mcgeary

current blog

2011-05-05T06:03:00.000-07:00

I do my blogging at http://blog.sina.com.cn/kmcgeary now.

The English is on the lower half of every post.

The Wisdom of The Simpsons

2010-05-19T20:05:00.000-07:00

Below is another post relating my all-time favourite TV show to some life-experiences I've had.

When I was 14 and underperforming in school...underperforming is too weak a word, the kind of word that parents use to deflect talk of their problems. I was failing and frequently being called "a disaster" "a failure" "a fuck-up" from all directions.

In an attempt to get me focused on my studies, my parents first banned me from playing the guitar, then banned me from watching the Simpsons.

Of course I was angry, but this is just the kind of thing that would have happened in The Simpsons, and if it did, it wouldn't be portrayed judgmentally, but portrayed with equanimity.

Two such scenes from the Simpsons reflect my situation well. In the first, Homer and Marge are called in to meet Bart's school counselor, and when asked for his opinion the counselor declares "Bart needs to learn to be less of an individual and more of a faceless blob." In the other, Homer first meets Marge in a detention. When explaining why he is there, Homer says "they put me in detention for being me. I come here every day and be me, and they punish me for it."

Directly after graduating from my Bachelors, I took a summer job. It was a job in which some students make a lot of money, but most make a net loss. The company that ran this summer program were excellent at taking credit for the successes and dodging responsibility for the failures.

In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer gets sponsored by the Power Sauce Energy-Bar company to climb a mountain. When the company loses faith in Homer, they start looking for other people to blame. On reaching the top， Homer scraps the plan of planting a Powersauce flag on the top, and instead places a 'Simpsons' flag. For me, this symbolizes a rejection of the pseudo-collectivism that some companies cultivate for their own self-interest.

For the last three years, I've been working as a teacher. In an episode of the Simpsons where Lisa meets a particularly inspiring teacher, the teacher explains: "One day you'll miss your brother's antics. When your life takes you to far away places, places where your itelligence is an asset, not a liability. " I've always been aware that I'm a pawn in this education-system (same as I would be back home), but I've always striven for this level of connection with my students. As for the substance of what he says, "places where your intelligence is an asset, not a liability." The (as I then thought) exam-orientated, spirit-crushing, secondary schooling system I went through, was an innocent child compared to the one I'm working in now.

And the last scene I'd like to reference, Bart sits down with his fallen idol Krusty the Klown. Bart explains to the impoverished, crestfallen clown "My mom says God never closes a door without opening a window." Krusty prompty replies "No offence kid, but your mom's a dingbat." In Empire of Illusion Chris Hedges writes eloquently about how positive psychology can strangle creativity and moral autonomy. I also have experience of the tyranny of mindless optimism, and Krusty the Klown so eloquently defends my position here.

Three Years in China

2010-05-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

I got to China on 7th of May 2007. It's been an interesting three years. Below I've listed five of the most memorable moments.

1. Monster Face
The first year, I lived in a wealthy part of a coastal city called Huizhou. At the time, I lived in a dormitory with other westerners, and I'd started learning Chinese from scratch. China was a bewildering, exotic, unknowable place.
Needless to say, the teaching presented some challenges. In one lesson, I had to teach Kindergarten students the vocabulary: nose, eyes, mouth, ears. In order to do that I used a song called Monster Face, which climaxed with all of the boys making Monster Faces, and chasing the girls around the classroom: anarchy.

2. Children's Day 2008
Children's Day 2007 had been bad. Our Head Teacher had just died. I hadn't yet learned how to channel students' restlessness into positive energy, so had some pretty lousy lessons.
By the summer of 2008, I was teaching HIgh School in a village in Northern Guangdong. I was into my last lesson by the time I'
d been reminded that it was Children's Day.
Instead of proceeding with the prepared lesson, I let them play some party games. Not a vintage piece of educating, but something that allowed them to momentarily forget their (to us, unimaginable) exam pressure.

3. Singing on the Train
IN January of 2009, I traveled through the Guangdong province. On a train from Huizhou to Longchuan, my ticket was standing and the carriage was crowded. After 2 hours of idly looking at some song lyrics I was trying to memorize, a stocky Northerner asked me:
"What instrument's that you're carrying?"
"A guitar"
"Can you play us a song?"
SO after some persuasion, I played and sang a children's song called 让我们荡起双浆 “Let's Sway the Oars Together”

4. 5.12
On 12th of May 2009, in order to commemorate the wenchuan earthquake, I got together with a class from the music department of the University I was teaching in, to sing a song called 让世界充满爱 a 1986 song that is roughly the Chinese equivalent of "WE are the World."

5. Busking
As a Caucasian in China, it's always easy to get attention. BUt it's never easy to get attention for anything other than being a Caucasian,and all of the baggage that comes with it. So performing on the street must have been a much stranger experience for observers than it was for me.
http://bbs.city.tianya.cn/tianyacity/Content/47/991085.shtml

我是2007年05月05号到中国的。这三年真过得很奇怪。我写下5个很深的回忆。

第一扮鬼脸

头一年我在惠州教了小学生。那时候，我住在外教的宿舍，而且只懂一点中文，所以我认识的中国人不多。那时候一切都有异国情调。

本来教那里的学生确实很难，但是他们有时候很搞笑。有一节课，当我教小一的学生nose, mouth, ears 那些单词，为了让他们记住，我让了他们扮鬼脸。课堂里的学生都扮鬼脸挺难忘。

第二 08年儿童节

07年的儿童节过得不好。我们的校长刚去世了。学校的气氛很不好。

08年暑假我在龙川的两所高中学校上班了，儿童节晚上，我不给学生们上课，我在课堂里，让大家在教室里玩自己想玩的游戏。这样确实不负责，但是做高中学生能让人家失去童心。那天晚上，班上的学生能让他们一时忘记外面的压力

第三火车上演唱

09年一月我在广东省旅游了。我从惠州到龙川坐火车了。我的票是无坐的。车很拥挤。在我对面的一个北方人问了我“你的乐器是什么？”

“吉他”

“能不能弹一个曲子给我们听？”

我就边弹了边唱了《让我们荡起双桨》

第四 5.12 的纪念日

在文理学院唱《让世界充满爱》

第五街头上表演

深圳这座城市能让人家失去想象力。看我在街上应该会给人一个奇怪的感觉

http://bbs.city.tianya.cn/tianyacity/Content/284/1/163977.shtml

The Kindness of Strangers

2010-03-10T04:06:00.000-08:00

The most intricate Chinese lyric I've written so far is the song <把我当家人>（Treat Me As One of Your Own） it's about the kindness of strangers and dependence thereon.

In my first two years in China, I had some amazing experiences meeting strangers: including getting my guitar out and giving a mini-concert in a train-carriage; getting a lesson in local history from a veteran of the Sino-Japanese war; having a meal with a group of 18 year-old builders; and playing my earliest Chinese songs by a lake in a campus, letting curious people come and go.

Often, as a foreigner in China, when in public, one walks into a wall of friendliness: as expressed in introductory questions, light conversation, and the taking of photographs. I have no reason to believe that there is a sinister side to all this attention we get, but, if I were getting racially abused, I wouldn't take it personally, so as it is, I don't take it personally.

In November last year, I was ordering a meal in an expensive restaurant, and the young waitress was being exceptionally friendly, exceptionally friendly. I'm told she was a beauty, but I didn't make eye-contact, I'm told she was into me but I only gave one word answers to all of her questions. My companion at the time assures me that it was a missed opportunity for a one-night-stand, but I have long since developed a distaste for Chinese people who single westerners out for special friendliness, it would have been like spending the evening with a talking Linda Lovelace.

There's a difference between kindness and friendliness, and I don't believe there is any correlation.

Anybody who knows what a cliche is knows that cliches are a bad thing. But it takes education and experience to develop a distaste for cliche. The friendliness I encounter in China is always a cliched kind of friendliness. After a while, it ceases to matter that most of the time, it is motivated by sincere kindness.

My biggest fear in life is not being used (being used means that I must be useful). It is living in a world where conversations follow a formula; individuals adhere to stereotype; and self-expression is trivialized.

Just as a one-night-stand is no substitute for a romance. Reflexive friendliness is no substitute for learned and leisurely hospitality.

The Unofficial National Anthem of Northern Ireland

2010-03-05T09:08:00.001-08:00

The author and original performer of the song is Phil Coulter. But I have linked to the Luke Kelly version of the song, because Luke had a much more powerful voice than Phil Coulter.

Some would react to this song as 'corny'. As if expression of raw sentiment and civic pride is a sign of naivety. Our culture tends to look down on innocence, associating it with stupidity, but if you think your superior cynicism makes you smarter than Phil Coulter, I'll bet you that you're wrong.

Here it is
The Town I Loved so Well
In my memory I will always see
the town that I have loved so well
Where our school played ball by the gasyard wall
And we laughed through the smoke and the smell.
Going home in the rain, running up the dark lane
Past the jail and down behind the fountain.
Those were happy days in so many many ways
In the town I loved so well.

In the early morning the shirt factory horn
called women from Creggan, the Moor and the bog,
while men on the dole played the mother's role
fed the children and then trained the dog.
And when times got tough, there was just about enough,
and we saw it through without complaining.
For deep inside was a burning pride
For the town I loved so well.

There was music there in the Derry air
like a language that we all could understand
I remember the day that I earned my first pay
when I played in a small pick-up band.
There I spent my youth and to tell you the truth
I was sad to leave it all behind me
For I'd learned about life and I'd found a wife
In the town I loved so well.

But when I've returned, how my eyes have burned
To see how a town can be brought to its knees
With the armoured cars, and the bombed-out bars
and the gas that hangs on to every tree
Now the army's installed by the old gas-yard wall
And the damned barbed-wire gets higher and higher
With their tanks and their guns, oh my God what have they done
to the town I loved so well

Now the music's gone but they carry on
for their spirit's been bruised never broken
They will not forget though their hearts are set
on tomorrow and peace once again.
For what's done is done, and what's won is won
And what's lost is lost and gone forever.
I can only pray for a bright brand new day
In the town I loved so well

My All Time Favourite Film Soundtracks

2010-03-01T08:41:00.000-08:00

None of the choices are daring or off-the-wall but fuck you they're mine.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)
The Guns of Navarone (1961)
To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962)
Chariots of Fire (1981)
Schindler's List (1993)
On the Waterfront (1954)
The Mission (1986)
Some Like it Hot (1959)
Vertigo (1958)
Double Indemnity (1944)
The Great Race (1965)

The First and Last Recipe: Ulysses

2010-02-28T18:13:00.000-08:00

I've noticed that John Berger's 1991 essay on Joyce's Ulysses is nowhere to be found online so I've typed it up and put it here.

I first sailed into James Joyce's Ulysses when I was 14 years old. I use the word sailed into instead of read because, as its title reminds us, the book is like an ocean; you do not read it, you navigate it.

Like many people whose childhoods are lonely, I had by the age of fourteen an imagination that was already grown-up, ready to put to sea; what it lacked was experience. I had already read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and its title was the honorary title I gave to myself in my daydreams. A kind of alibi or a kind of seaman's card - to show, when challenged, to the middle-aged, or one of their agents.

It was the winter of 1940-41. Joyce was in fact dying of a duodenal ulcer in Zurich. But I did not know that then. I did not think of him as mortal. I knew what he looked like and even if he suffered from bad eyesight, I did not picture him as a god, but I felt him through his words, through his endless perambulations, as ever-present. And so not prone to die.

The book had been given to me by a friend who was a subversive schoolmaster. Arthur Stowe his name. Stowbird I called him. I owe him everything. It was he who extended his arm and offered me a hand to grasp so I could climb out of the basement in which I had been brought up, a basement of conventions, taboos, rules, idees recues, prohibitions, fears, where nobody dared to question anything and where everybody used their courage - for courage they had - to submit no matter what, without complaining.

It was the French edition in English published by Shakespeare and Company. Stowbird had bought it in Paris on his last trip before the war broke out in 1939. He used to wear a log raincoat and a black beret acquired at the same moment.

When he gave the book to me, I believed it was illegal in Britain to own a copy. In fact this was no longer the case (it had been) and I was mistaken. Yet the 'illegality' of the book was for me, a fourteen year-old, a telling literary quality. And there perhaps, I was not mistaken. I was convinced that illegality was an arbitrary pretence. Necessary for the social contract, indispensable for society's survival, but turning it's back on lived experience. I knew this by instinct when I read the book for the first time, I came to appreciate with mounting excitement that it's supposed illegality as an object was more than matched by the illegitimacy of the lives and souls in its epic.

Whilst I read the book, the Battle of Britain was being fought in the sky above the south coast of England and London. The country was expecting invasion. No future was certain. Between my legs I was becoming a man, but it was quite possible that I would not live long enough to discover what life was about. And of course I didn't know. And of course I didn't believe what I was told - either in history classes, or on the radio or in the basement.

All of their accounts were too small to add up to the immensity of what I did not know, and of what I might never have. Not, however, Ulysses. This book had that immensity. It didn't pretend to it; it was impregnated by it, it flowed through it. To compare the book with an ocean again makes sense, for isn't it the most liquid book ever written?

Now I was about to write: there were many parts, during this first reading, which I didn't understand. Yet this would be false. There were no parts that I understood. And there was no part that did not make the same promise to me: the promise that deep down, beneath the words, beneath the pretences, beneath the claims and everlasting moral judgment, beneath the opinions, lessons, boasts and cant of everyday life, the lives of adult women and men were made of such stuff that this book was made of: offal with flecks in it of the divine. The first and last recipe!

Even at my young age I recognized Joyce's prodigious erudition. He was, in one sense, learning incarnate. But learning without solemnity that threw away its cap and gown to become joker and juggler. (As I write about him, something of the rhythm of his words still animates my pen). Perhaps even more significant for me at that time was the company his learning kept: the company of the unimportant, those forever off stage, the company of publicans and sinners as the Bible puts it, low company. Ulysses is full of the disdain of the represented for those who claim (falsely) to represent them and packed with the tender ironies of those who are said (falsely) to be lost.

And he did not stop there - this man who was telling me about the life I might never know, this man who never spoke down to anybody, and who remains for me to this day an example of the true adult, which is to say of a being who, because he has accepted life, is intimate with it - this man did not stop there, for his penchant for the lowly led him to keep the same kind of company within his single characters: he listened to their stomachs, their pains, their tumescences: he heard their first impressions, their uncensored thoughts, their ramblings, their prayers without words, their insolent grunts and heaving fantasies. And the more carefully he listened to what scarcely anybody had listened to before, the richer became life's offering.

One day in the autumn of 1941 my father, who must have been anxiously surveying me for some time, decided to check out the books on the shelf by my bed. Having done so, he confiscated five, including Ulysses. He told me the same evening what he had done and added that he had locked all five in the safe in his office! At this time he was doing important war work for the government on the question of how to increase factory production. I had a vision of my Ulysses locked away under folders of government secrets, labelled Highly Confidential.

I was furious as only a fourteen-year-old can be. I refused to compare my father's pain - as he had asked me to - with my own. I painted a portrait of him - the largest canvas I had done to date - where I made him look diabolic, with the colors of Mephistopheles. Yet my fury notwithstanding, I couldn't help acknowledging something else: the story of the confiscated books and the father in fear for the son's soul and the Chubb safe and the government files might have come straight out of the confiscated book in question, and it would have been narrated with equanimity and without hate.

Today, fifty years later, I continue to live the life for which Joyce did so much to prepare me, and I have become a writer. It was he who showed me, before I knew anything, that literature is inimicable to all hierarchies and that to separate fact and imagination, event and feeling, protagonist and narrator, is to stay on dry land and never put to see.

Under the upswellinng tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night: lifted flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary; and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrosio heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus injurias patiens ingemiscit. To no end gathered; vainly then released, forthflowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a toil of waters.

I suppose I should form a response to my previous post

2010-02-28T02:07:00.000-08:00

This is an essay by a guy convinced that other people are perverts. Immediately, the words Travis and Bickle spring to mind: a man who can't see his own perversion. Words like 种族主义 (racism) and 法西斯主义 (fascism) are seldom used in public discourse in China, but that doesn't mean they don't have a huge part to play.

Near the beginning he says "As a Chinese scholar..." does anybody seriously think this guy s a scholar?

Notice that in the essay, the words, white, western, and foreign are all interchangeable, and he never explores the meaning of any. Chinese girls who make a fuss over us just because of what we represent are inarguably degrading themselves, but he never asks the question, isn't it also degrading to us whiteys, westerners and foreigners? And at least 50% of all the aggressively friendly 崇洋媚外 people who I've had to deal with in my 3 years have been male: at least.

He never questions whether nationalism, racial prejudice, social conservatism, and misogyny are good or bad things. His essay is all of those things and more.

Why is this article not on Chinasmack or any other English site? Why has it had so little attention from the expat community or the international media? I find it very disturbing and very telling.

My translation of a popular essay on the Chinese blogosphere

2010-02-27T05:09:00.000-08:00

中国女人，请不要上老外的床！http://www.shanghaistuff.com/forum/topics/zhong-guo-nu-ren-qing-bu-yao

Chinese women! Please don’t get into bed with foreigners.

If you ask a foreigner, why did you come to China?
He’ll usually tell you, because I admire China’s long history, wonderful culture, the stunning scenery, the breakneck development, the amazing changes.

But I tell you, apart from the very few who are sponsored by the government, and those who are backed by large companies, the overwhelming majority are here for two reasons.

The first, they can’t support themselves very well at home, or maybe even can’t support themselves at all.
The second, for Chinese girls.

One afternoon, myself and a friend, a French girl were returning from eating out, we were at the entrance of our place of work, far away opposite us, there was an oldie collecting rubbish, in his hand he was pushing a small cart, at this point the French girl poked me, “”Did you see that?” “See what?” I replied bewilderedly. “In front of you.” I then discovered, the oldie was a foreigner. His hair was long, dirty, and messy. No wonder myself, from that distance, and with my eyesight, thought he was just a garbage collector. The cart in front of him was not for carrying rubbish, but it was a mixed-race baby. Beside him was a Chinese girl, a young, beautiful, statuesque Chinese girl.

The French girl giggled: “Why do Chinese girls do this?” The reason she was laughing was because, while we had been eating, we had been discussing this issue. Actually, I’d already heard stories of this kind of foreigner with Chinese girls, but I’d never thought anything of it, but now it was before my eyes it was too powerful to ignore: a gorgeous Chinese girl with an old, ugly, dirty, short, bald, shrivelled foreigner, and their baby in a push-chair.

As well as that, the French girl wouldn’t stop laughing, (I had no idea why she was laughing like that) at that moment, as a Chinese, my self-respect was affected deeply.

Several days later, I made three decisions:
Tell everybody the ugly truth about the foreigners I know.
Inspire the Chinese people to rise up and stop Chinese girls from fawning over foreign men.
and most importantly, as a Chinese scholar, research how foreign women look at Chinese men, then I can use that knowledge to help Chinese men attract foreign women.

My first act was to go with my colleagues to interview some white women who live in China but have never had a Chinese boyfriend, address the central point of my research. Even more importantly, we wanted to go and interview those who had had a Chinese boyfriend, and white women who had married a Chinese man, invite them to tell us what are the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese men. I know that foreigners who fit this description are few, but luckily, I’ve already met several.

We also wanted to hand out a questionnaire to these white women, in order to use more scientific methods, to get them to describe how they view Chinese men, and try to found out who are the five most charming Chinese men that they can think of. All of this research will answer for me one question:

Are foreign women interested in Chinese men? What do the single foreign women in China most want from a foreign man? How do Chinese men become more charming for foreign women? What kind of Chinese men are most attractive to foreign women? What kind of foreign women go for Chinese guys? How do you meet foreign women? In public, how does one approach a foreign woman? When did China become heaven for foreign men?

John is just such an example. Not long ago, I met him on the street, holding hands with a Chinese girl who was taller than him. To introduce himself, he said his Chinese girlfriend works for the Home and Motors Company. In fact, it wasn’t John who introduced himself to me, I didn’t get his attention yet, because this instance of meeting him was world’s apart from the last occasion.

John is an American, 42 years old, height 1.67 metres. He hasn’t even graduated from University; in America he couldn’t get himself a decent job. After living in Africa for a couple of years, he heard the get rich quick stories of many Americans in China, and came to Shanghai. When he first came to Shanghai he wasn’t familiar with life here, so he get himself an English teaching job in a small town in Jiangsu.

John wasn’t happy, after a couple of months in Jiangsu, he came to Shanghai to look for work, he stayed in a cheap hotel for 12 yuan a night. I met him then. That day I went to eat with a foreign friend of mine, and I saw them chatting, I thought she knew John, so I invited him over to. I didn’t know until later that they had only met by chance there and then.

When we were ordering dinner, John ordered a pretty expensive dish, my friend asked him in English, the thing you ordered was pretty expensive, do you intend to pay for it yourself? John carried on like a kid who’d been caught doing something naughty. I saw him racking his brain, first I told my friend in Chinese not to worry, then I told him in English to continue choosing.

After that, because of work and other responsibilities, I quickly forgot him. This time I saw him, he told me that he’d found an English teaching job in a school in Shanghai. I didn’t talk to his girlfriend, but I could tell that she looked down on Chinese people. Looking at her background, I was tempted to think, I bet she doesn’t know that her American John once relied on other people to buy him dinner. This is rather too similar to a fairytale, it’s obviously manmade, and after making it up, man goes and lives it.

Also, on a Shanghai bus, I spotted a typical American street-hood with a young Chinese girl. And in broad daylight, he put his hand under her shirt and started feeling her breasts. After ten minutes, the Chinese girl clearly wanted to say that her breasts had had enough stroking, but unfortunately her English ability was limited to a couple of words at most.

A taxi driver told me, once outside a famous bar he met a black man, both of his arms around a Chinese girl. Originally, he thought, this must be a working girl so he wasn’t bothered, but they ended asking them to drop her off at the dormitories of a famous college, it was then that he felt a shock.

It’s reported that, some hospital in Beijing received an AIDS patient, this American businessman confessed before dying, in the preceding weeks in Beijing, he had been with six Chinese women, on further investigation, most of them were respected intellectuals.

This bunch of foreigners in China: they can’t find jobs in their own country, they use their status as foreigners in China to get money, chug beer, and chase women. Their only hobby is criticizing China. Some diplomats even use their position to have their way with Chinese girls. Some even publicly say, “My identity can get me any Chinese girl I want.”

China, do you know, you give foreigners too much, way too much, and in return foreigners do nothing but look down on you. You should call them something even they are not used to. Call them white trash. I also want to take this opportunity to officially tell these foreigners “don’t congratulate yourselves too much, you’ve only had the flesh of Chinese girls, not their souls nor the best of what they have to offer.”

Recently, a joke has been doing the rounds on the Chinese internet about a foreigner seeking marriage in China: a 47 year-old foreigner enters a Chinese marriage-agency, there have been no inquiries in a long time. Then suddenly one day, he received two letters proposing marriage, the foreigner was shocked. On further investigation, he discovered that one of the staff at the marriage agency had put his age at 67.

An independent survey recently confirmed that Chinese women don’t marry foreign men for love. They also discovered, the average age-gap between a Chinese woman marrying a Western man is 10.5 years. 13% are of entirely different generations, a full 20-year age gap. It is reported that the record age-gap for a Chinese-foreign marriage is 54 years. On the day they were married the American man was 82 and the Chinese girl was 28.

Incidentally, I recently saw a joke in an American magazine: a man in his eighties took his pregnant wife (in her twenties) to the hospital. The doctor gently asked him the baby could possibly be someone else’s. The old man replied “no way, I can perform miracles. Once, when my wife and I went hunting with one of her boyfriends, I used an umbrella to point at a deer, that deer just dropped dead there and then.”

I don’t know if that Chinese girl will get pregnant, but it would definitely make one respect the human capacity for creating miracles. You might have achieved something, but you’ve lost the most valuable of self-respect.

Needless to say, the instigators of these ugly foreigners’ success are the Chinese women. But these women, most have never been abroad, their brains are full of fantasies. So, today I want to take this opportunity to tell them the truth. If you’ve found true love, I congratulate you and wish you luck. Personally I say, if it’s true love, then no matter what troubles the future brings, it’s worth pursuing.

Nevertheless, I also want to warn you, firstly, Chinese women above all seek marriages that are stable, in developed Western countries, the divorce rate is around 50%, for inter-racial marriages, the statistics are even higher.

Secondly, I find it highly unlikely; the foreign men of today afford Chinese girls true love, because the first ingredient of true love is respect. And in the eyes of foreign men, the image of Chinese women has already been ruined by that minority, it’s already changed: the world’s most open, most forward, least careful, simple-minded, half-witted, stupid and easy girls. It’s very hard to believe that any man would give true love to this kind of girl. I only have one example, I heard an American say he was looking for an Asian girl who was a combination of maid, cook, and sex worker.

Maybe you’re only after money, I understand you, and I don’t blame you. But I want to tell you, before committing yourself, you should be certain of two things: 1. Is this foreigner really rich? Because I know, many foreigners in China are not rich. 2. Does he want to marry you? If he doesn’t marry you, then his wealth will have nothing to do with you.

Maybe you want to travel abroad. Again, I don’t blame you. But before you commit yourself you should be certain of two things: 1. this foreigner wants to go home. The outside world is generally wealthier than China, but it’s certainly not heaven. The dangerous part is, many foreigners in China don’t want to go home, because they can’t find decent work at home, maybe even can’t find any work. They don’t want to go home to return to that idle, lonely life. 2. Does he want to marry you? If he doesn’t marry you, then you’ll never acquire the right to settle in his country.

My colleague’s neighbour’s daughter married a Japanese mountain farmer. The neighbour often says some analogies in front of my colleague “Now we don’t care about money. 100000, 200000 is a small number.” But, my neighbour replies, “do you know if your daughter’s really happy in Japan? Chinese people are obsessed with face. Will always tell good news, and disregard bad news. Some years ago, a Chinese TV show interviewed a Chinese girl who had married into a Japanese farming community. From lively, vibrant, colourful Shanghai to the remote, cold hills of Japan, the Chinese girl could only express disappointment and helplessness.

Maybe you’re after sex. In Australia, a female author, Miss Shi, has written, “I have a girlfriend, by Chinese standards she is extremely open, a woman of vast sexual experience, the first time she was with a western man, she felt an extreme pleasure. She told me over the phone that the feeling this Western man gave her was so good that she wanted to marry him, and I calmly told her, 8 out of 10 western men are great in bed, 2 out of 10 are average. 2 out of 10 are awful.”

By saying this, Miss Shi really stirred the pot. Swathes of Chinese men came out of the woodwork to defend themselves. This topic had been discussed in our local newspapers over several months, it’s even spilled over into parts of the international media. Apparently, this is a very sensitive subject for Chinese men.

This 2/10 figure was made up on a basis of Miss Shi’s own experience, and to consolidate her own feelings, it was not however based on knowledge. What are Chinese men really like in bed? I did my own investigation.

This time my subject was not Chinese women who had married Western men, this time I wanted to ask white women who had married Chinese men, or had once had a Chinese boyfriend. I bluntly asked them one question, what are Chinese men like in bed? They bluntly replied, very good, some even said perfect. One even responded with a question of her own, “are Chinese men not confident in their own sexual prowess?”

I should continue my investigation, when I am finished my research I will make my findings public.

Moreover, I’d like to tell everyone, the latest research on sex shows that, a woman’s pleasure in bed does not depend on the man she is with, it depends on herself. This research goes to show, women’s failure to enjoy herself in bed, is usually the result of her own suppression of her own spirit. As long as women can rise above this repression, then they can be as happy and carefree as men in bed, maybe even more so. This research proves, that the real reason Miss Shi’s friend experienced so much pleasure the first time she was with a Western man was because of what he represented to her, it allowed her to let go of her repression.

The most recent studies have shown that men and women have similar responses to sexual stimulation. Before, it was believed that men depended on visual stimulation and women depended on atmosphere and ambience to prepare for sex, that has been used to explain why men like to watch porn. But visual stimulation can also arouse women, even to the point of orgasm.

I can tell you, Chinese men’s problem is not physical, it is psychological. What’s Chinese men’s biggest problem? Lack of sexual technique. Western men’s advantages are, in both urban and rural areas, they have sexual counselling and treatment clinics, an open attitude towards sex, and if they have a problem, they can seek support. To use an inappropriate example, an old lady who has cooked all her life is not as good as a young chef, because professional training is so important.

I call upon you to eliminate all of these ugly foreign men. Some of you might already be blaming the Chinese women, but aren’t we all responsible for creating this situation for the ugly foreign men.

The kind of women who are only after money are everywhere in the world, in America they are called “Gold-giggers”. In other parts of the world, these kinds of women are looked down upon. It’s only in China where they are respected and envied. This society that mocks poverty but not wealth is responsible for creating them.

There is an American female Professor of Chinese, who has an incomparable love of Chinese history, and cherishes Chinese culture, took her husband to China. But after not very long she decided to return home early. “Everyday my husband was surrounded by Chinese women, Some didn’t even bother disguising their excitement. In order to preserve my marriage, I decided it was best to return to America.” This American Professor bemusedly stated, “back in America, I read a Chinese novel from the eighties, the novel is full of women and their lovers who are not careful, accidentally have a baby, and end up having to throw it into the river.”

I also don’t get it, we’re all Chinese people, but in a short twenty years, our attitudes have changed so much.

I would like to know, the ones who give special attention to foreigners, especially Americans, are they these same women? I can understand the American President’s visit to China being in the headlines, but everything else the American President does being in the headlines is taking it a bit far isn’t it? Don’t forget, the more fuss you make over them, the less fuss they might make over you.

Here, I am appealing to achieve one thing, stop Chinese women from surrounding Western men. I am deeply aware that as an individual, my power is miniscule, so I want to encourage everybody to rise up: if you know any young Chinese girls who have opportunities to meet foreign men, please feel duty bound to show them this essay.

If you married a foreigner, bravely stand up and tell your sisters: your life abroad is actually lonely, repressed, painful, and homesick. If you are the parents of such people, don’t boast about your daughter’s life bound to this sluttish moneybags existence.

If you are a translator, under no circumstances get emotionally involved. Our translation of the names of foreign countries shows that we subconsciously have an inferiority complex to them. We translate the word America into “Beautiful Country,” whereas our Japanese neighbours translate it into “Grain Country,” a much better translation! If your imagination is vivid, don’t think of America as a perfect country, or a beautiful country, think of it as a grain production base.

If you work in an international company, don’t look up to foreigners, “foreign affairs are not all big affairs.” Have a better attitude towards your own fellow citizens, foreigners come and go. Don’t forget, the food you eat was cooked by Chinese people, the clothes you wear were made by Chinese people, your salary is paid by Chinese people.

If you work in sport, don’t let foreigners earn Chinese people’ money, most importantly, don’t welcome foreign thugs like Tyson into China again.

If you work in an insurance company, don’t look at foreigners differently again, treat them the same as your compatriots.

If you work in positions of authority, please be less corrupt. The corruption is the main reason for the bad atmosphere in our society, and this is your responsibility.

If you are an economist, don’t just think about your vested interests, don’t just think about powerful people, say a few words for the man on the street please.

If you are a policy maker, do not get wrapped up in self-interest. If the mountains are bald, the water is smelly, the air is dirty, the dust storms are rising, and everyday morals are declining. If nobody cares, and social harmony is lost, if the suffering are left for dead, then what does your power really count for?

If you’ve earned yourself some money, be kind. Have some morals in the way you spend it. Don’t be greedy and materialistic. Contribute to society.

If you are a Doctor, please save people’s lives. Do your job ethically. Don’t let the angels in white die in your hands.

If you are a Lawyer, respect the law. Don’t use your power to prey on innocent people.

If you are a film-maker, don’t waste all of your money on crowd-pleasing. Make some films about Chinese girls who turn down foreign men, or Chinese men who hook-up with Western girls.

If you work in dentistry, please recommend a decent toothpaste for the Chinese people. Today’s Chinese people rely too much on primitive methods of oral hygiene.

If you work in advertising, please have less of these disgusting words like “Royal” “Noble” “Elite” “Successful” and “Luxury.”

If you serve as a role model for young kids, please teach them a sense of shame. When I was young, my mother told me, clothes may be tattered, but will never be dirty; people may be poor, but will never be downtrodden; wealth cannot be prostituted, conviction cannot be destroyed, the head can be cut and blood can flow, but life is precious, love is even more valuable. Why don’t todays children hear such speeches?

If you are a Chinese woman, hold your head up high. If you are a Chinese man, straighten your spine. In this world, there is an unalienable truth, if a person doesn’t respect himself, he will never achieve the respect of others. A country, and a race is also the same.

The Troubles of Northern Ireland

2010-02-08T07:37:00.000-08:00

The Troubles (a title that reflects the culture's tendency towards understatement) extended from approximately 1966 to approximately 1998. But by the nature of the conflict, its difficult to set exact dates on either its beginning or its end.

The two most well-known atrocities that happened in Northern Ireland were Bloodey Sunday of 1972 and the Omagh Bomb of 1998.

In the time between those two incidents: Latin America's most benevolent democracy was hijacked by its own military; a revolution in Indo-China began with women and girls tossing flowers at their new leaders and ended with piles of human bones that stretched into the horizon; In Iran, a tyrant was overthrown and their new leader oppressed the women, persecuted the intellectuals, and led his people into a long victorless war; an explosion spread a radioactive cloud across the Berlin Wall and it burnt over Europe like a lamp; In China's Gate of Heavenly Peace, the students and workers clashed with the army in their nation's capital.

A Dog Chasing A Car

2010-02-03T06:20:00.000-08:00

The below is a necessarily meandering defense of the directionless life. A more academic tone could not do the job of arguing my point.

A question frequently asked in job interviews is "Where do you see yourself in ten years' time?"

The Financial Crisis of 2008 ruined or set back many people's plans for the future: factories in China closed, forcing workers to lose their jobs; office-departments merged or closed down, forcing workers to lose their jobs, these aren't original observations I know.

The Financial Crisis happened at the end of a summer in which the blockbuster film was "The Dark Knight." In the film's most memorable performance, Heath Ledger inquires "Do I look like a guy with a plan?...I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it...I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control really are. "

I am not encouraging all young people to become a dog chasing a car. But the working-lives of my generation will be different to our parents' and their parents' working-lives. As for any generation, making a living and making a life are both difficult processes. But for mine, the two processes seem particularly separate.

Before I continue, I should explain which generation I'm from, and why, at 26, I still haven't started (or even selected) a career. I came to China in May 2007, eight months after graduating from my Masters Degree. Some people think of teaching English in China as an anti-career, as a way of avoiding entering the real world. Although many English teachers in China are unsuccessful in their own countries, I don't encourage anybody to measure their worth as a human being in terms of how much money they make, or their position in society. Teaching English in China is a good way of simultaneously making a living and making a life. And, no it's not a way of escaping working for THE MAN, it's merely a different kind of rat-race.

My coming to China happened shortly before the credit-crunch which was followed by the Financial Crisis. There were lay-offs across a variety of sectors, and those suffering most were those with the least experience, on this basis, it could be argued that my coming to China was a good career move. But, in the words of Baz Luhrmann in a song that means a lot to the people who were teenagers of the 1990s and 2000s: "Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, and don't berate yourself too much either. Your decisions are half chance. So are everybody else's"

A popular saying at the time of my graduation was "Business is the new rock 'n' roll." In Britain, businessmen such as Simon Cowell and Peter Jones are icons and figures projected as role-models for the young. But in my meager experience, business was not the new rock 'n' roll but the new religion. In the summer after finishing my undergraduate degree I entered into a work experience where conformity was forced, cash was worshiped, and views that dissented from the values of the business I worked for were mocked.

Before coming to China, there were many things that I wanted to do with my life, but they were all incompatible to paid work. Any job I had sought would merely have been a way of supporting my hobbies: playing the guitar; creative writing; critical writing. I agree that: "When pleasure is the business of life, it ceases to be pleasure."

So for the time being, I will continue with the teaching-in-China, although there is clearly no future in it. It's a job that enables me to meet interesting people, grow as a teacher, push myself to keep learning (in order to grow as a teacher) and frees up enough time to pursue other things.

Busking in China

2010-02-03T01:25:00.000-08:00

Once when I was small, I saw a middle-aged man singing in a shopping-centre. I asked who he was. It was explained to me: “if you don’t do well in school, that’s what you might end up doing for a living.”

There are very few buskers in Shenzhen. When I first came here late last summer, I wondered if this was because their reputation isn’t good.

We are the first generation to have mp3s, video-sharing websites, and i-pods. As well as in bars, concert-halls, and tea-houses, we have recorded music in our offices, cars and living-rooms. We live in the age of the global village, when we can enjoy African folk music, Latin dance, and the Great Composers of the West, without the inconvenience of paying for a ticket to see them.

I wanted to know, can street performers still really move people? Will people look down on unknown, undecorated, artists?

At the beginning of last year, I began writing songs in Mandarin. Since then, I’ve wanted to make people hear my music, but I have no idea as to how to enter the music business.

Performing on the street is different to more traditional types of performance. There is no stage, no tickets, the audience can reach out and touch the performer. It can add some color to the streets of this busy and businesslike city.

Before I began, I didn’t know whether I was a great artist, or an eccentric daydreamer. Now, I am happy to call myself a great daydreamer.

http://www.tudou.com/home/mcgeary

Uncivilised Writing

2009-07-23T14:43:00.000-07:00

I wonder if this song is uncivilized. Every verse begins with an extra-linguistic scream, like a hey, an ooo, an aaa etc... but the lines that follow it rigidly rhyme with it. I wrote it myself.

The lyrics translate as:

Hey! We're born in order to feel.
It's what us mammals are good at.

Aaa! We'll all be swallowed by the earth
So I don't allow anything to embarrass me

This planet could silently disappear
Why do you dedicate your life to doing nothing?

Hoooo! Singers are just monsters of egotism
But I don't fail to make you sigh.

Wooaaah! Don't let yourself be bullied into falling in love.
But you're running out of time in which to choose me.

Excuse me, what exactly is history?
Just one fucking thing after another.

If you're going to buried under the fresh flowers,
You might as well sieze the opportunity to overcome your fears.

En! The Universe doesn't care about us.
Let this knowledge liberate you lover!

Job-Seekers

2009-07-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

I finished my work in Changde, and because of the impossibility of becoming either a normal citizen, or getting recognition for the things I was doing well, I was not tempted to stay on.

So, just this once, I'll be collecting a Job Seeekers' cheque (no need to explain what that's a euphemism for) before I go back to China and tackle the Job Market there.

People back home often describe those of us who go to China to find work as brave, adventurous, idealistic. My decision to come to China was none of thse things. Before I tell this story, I will make the disclaimer that it is not a sad one. I've had more than my share of great memories and experiences during the course of events described, and although I will have an enormous challenge in starting a new life in Shenzhen next month, I've never been so optimistic about the future.

Leaving the British Isles was and is a no-brainer. I came back from America in October 2005 and immediately started my Masters in Creative and Critical Writing. As soon as I started I knew I would struggle to find a job on Graduation.

The summer of 2006 had a lot of good points: the time and space to write 'Beyond the Wings' my first completed book; a part-time cleaning job that gave me enough beer money to watch the World Cup; one of the most fruitful periods of reading I've ever had; a revival of my guitar-playing that had lain dormant since I'd worked 80 hours a week in America the previous summer, etc...

But that summer ended with me getting screwed in a Nigerian e-bay fraud, an episode which made a nonsense of the claim that my door-to-door selling experience would make me worldly and savvy.

I came back home from University in September, prepared to do whatever it took to start making my own way in the world, but I ended up doing a simple office job that I only got because of my family connections.

Altogether, despite sending my CV to hundreds of different companies, institutions, and agencies: between returning from America in October 2005 and going to China in May 2007, I landed 2 job interviews, one was for a job of less than £15,000 a year, which I didn't get, and one was for an investment job which didn't involve a salary.

One question that's frequently asked in job-interviews is "where do you see yourself in ten years' time?" It's a question that I can't answer truthfully, yet neither do I know which lie I should tell. I'm a believer in letting fate do its worst; taking on the challenges that are thrown at us; and doing one's best at whatever challenges come our way. I'm really not interested in 5 or 10 years plans. Giving an honest opinion as to where I'll be in 10 years would not impress any prudent employer.

Of course I have goals: to get recognition for the Chinese songs I write; to perform them on television; to get a regular literary job; to complete an Interpreters' exam in Chinese. But none of these things crossed my worried mind back in 2006. You should also appreciate that your goals will change. Within a short space of time last year, I went from being determined to get a girlfriend, to being determined to avoid getting a girlfriend.

In August, I intend to hit Shenzhen, Southern China, live in the cheapest hotel I can find, and spend every day cold-approaching schools, offering to give demo lessons and throwing my CV around. It's precarious, draining, and sometimes degrading. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

This Old House

2009-07-08T09:41:00.000-07:00

I'm back inthe UK for July because I suspected that the job-market in China had temporarily dried-up, and I didn't have the money to test the water. I'm staying at my parents house and living off hand-outs until I get back to China - where I have no new job confirmed.

So for this month I'm living in a large house with a garden, there's a full refrigerator and two cars on the drive. There are enough books on the shelf to keep anybody occupied for several academic years. There's a computer with web access that's always free, 2 unoccupied bedrooms and a bathroom with a large bathtub.

This last year in Hunan, I lived alone in a small, dark, featureless apartment that was freezing in winter and sweltering in summer. And when I lived there, I got things done.

Suggest possible reasons why on a postcard

Favourite Quotes

2009-05-12T17:40:00.000-07:00

Here are a few of my favourites

"To call a bad thing bad is to do little. To call a good thing good is to do much" - Goethe

"That which is seen is temporal, that which is unseen is eternal" - The Book of Corinthians

"The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with, isn't it? Believe or die! 'Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options'" - Bill Hicks

"He cannot be a guitarist who has not bathed in the fountain of culture" - Agustin Barrios Mangore

"Give a little love and it all comes back to you" - Bugsy Malone

" 'the soul, the ego, the ANIMUS' continued Orlick 'is very different from the body. Labyrinthine are the injuries inflictable on the soul. The tense of the body is the present indicative; but the soul has a memory and a present and a future'." Flann O'Brien (in 'At Swim Two Birds')'

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.' - Jack Kerouac (in On the Road).

"These are the days when men of all social disciplines andall political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted;when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence;when originality is taken to be a mark of instability;and when, in minor modification of the original parable,the bland lead the bland." John Kenneth Galbraith

"Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that. "
"By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth" George Carlin

"What doesn't kill you can only make you stranger" Heath Ledger

"When I held that gun in my hand, I felt a surge of power ... like God must feel when he's holding a gun."
"I want to share something with you: The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here. "
"When will you people learn? In America we stopped using corporal punishment and things have never been better. The streets are safe, old people strut confidently trough the darkest alleys and the weak and nerdy are admired for their computer programming abilities. So, like us, let your children run wild and free, for as the Bible tells us, "Let your children run wild and free." " Homer Simpson

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Samuel Beckett

"We cannot put off living until we are ready. Life is fired at us point-blank." - Jose Ortega y Gasset

"Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We are not here to be happy but to experience great and wonderful things." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

"Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to always be a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge." - Cicero

Strive not to be a man of success, but a man of value." - Albert Einstein

让我们荡起双桨

2009-04-13T05:35:00.000-07:00

A traditional Chinese children's song

别找我

2009-04-13T05:04:00.000-07:00

Apologies to the English-speaking world (if you're still there). This blog is currently the only place I can publish my music videos for the Mandarin-speaking world.

请勿跟随我女还

随时都欢迎你离开

有感觉我不能表达

有感觉我不能给

把被隐藏的情感

放在激情心上

别找我宝贝

你找英俊的绅士

只有闭眼睛才见

边看他骑白马

边嗅玫瑰

只有你怀疑一切

才能兴高采烈

别找我宝贝

你想从英雄的身上

学到成年怎么样

你信仰纯洁英年

你真想望赞美

别让传统观念

阻挡你演变

别找我宝贝

你以为我的头脑

使你完美的身感动

但你心灵我却看不见

你心我看不懂

你有机会一劳永逸

把我丢在被污染的风里

别找我宝贝

无所谓

2009-04-13T04:32:00.000-07:00

晚会的宾客在他眼中都很灿烂

所谓文明把门关在他脸上

在河边他一个人坐在月光里

干一杯为从未出现的记忆

什么都提醒他死亡在坚持

他在洗手间的地板上想过这件事

他礼尚往来但他没心要学待人接物

明白他深黑冷眼的人他屈指可数

在陌生的路上若有所思他走得太慢

挖空心思让生命的活力变得强

他对还没过来的时间怀旧

永远拒绝停止创建温柔

不鞠躬尽瘁口是心非

他抓住机会见义勇为

爱的真理

2009-04-11T18:45:00.000-07:00

把真理给我看

真爱有什么情感

有的人相信爱是个冒险

有人回答那只是一厢情愿

有情人感觉被叹为观止

有情人觉得进步被防止

上年纪前我需要勇气发现

我越不固步自封越有经验

让我们珍惜时间陪我游手好闲

让我们相信爱能把生命改变

根据诗人说爱情是美好梦想

根据医生说爱只是自然现象

按照失恋人情人都有气无力

按照智慧人谁都不晓得真理

我问过老人

问过疼爱中少男

大失所望每次老调重弹

我走过爱的禁区在那里举目无亲

今后我不再将会三思而行

表白向我这个圈外人

拥抱时代精神

跟我落叶归根

对缘分不闻不问

向祖先步人后尘

相爱不可能修改一切

真理根本不纯洁

把抱负终结

扩大眼界

开始看大千世界

2009-04-10T18:16:00.000-07:00

Sorry about uploading videos you've seen before. It's just part of an uploading, downloading experiment.

Trying to upload videos onto other websites (in view of the fact that Youtube's been blocked for over a month now) is for some reason very difficult

感觉

2009-04-09T22:13:00.000-07:00

嘿！我们出生是为了感觉

就是哺乳动物的专业

啊！在我极瘦的胸部上躺下

我们都将被大地吞下

地球能寂静地消失

为什么你无所事事

呼！我只是自大的怪物

但我不失败让你叹服

哦别忍受被情人强迫

但你快没时间了选择我

请问, 什么是历史？

一件又一件该死的事

如果你被埋在鲜花低下

先抓住机会战胜你的害怕

恩！宇宙对我们不闻不问

这个知识能自拔你情人

2009-04-05T19:50:00.000-07:00

"Five-star hotels are like McDonald's - everywhere the product is identical.
People don't go to deluxe hotels because they want to see the world. They go to them because they don't want to see the world"
Tanya Gold 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/06/deluxe-hotels-holidays-chew-diet

Essay

2009-03-31T19:04:00.001-07:00

I found out yesterday that I'd won an essay competition. The deadline was back in early December so I'd forgotten about it.

To those who don’t come from China, China has always been a mysterious country. Like all interesting things, the more you know about China, the more mysterious it gets. I chose to come to Changde because it is in the heartlands of China, in both senses of the word. Changde is a perfect example of what modern China is. There is a famous English poem that begins:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wildflower
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

You would have to be an excellent Scientist to see a world in a grain of sand, and I am not a Scientist at all. So the best I can attempt is to see a world in this small city.
I remember hearing the word ‘Changde’ for the first time, I don’t know where I was exactly, but I was somewhere along the Li Jiang River, swimming under the rising sun. The only person who was around for miles was a girl wearing all-white and carrying a white sun-umbrella. I looked into the ‘Beginner’s Mandarin Chinese’ book that I took everywhere I went, and asked her where she is from. She said she is from a small city in the Hunan Province called Changde. She could not speak English with any confidence so it was the wordlessness of our communication, and the beauty of the surrounding area that made this memory particularly different to my earlier experiences of China. Before that time, my experience of China had been the sound of car-horns and loud pop music. I decided then, in the summer of 2007, that I wanted to come to this person’s hometown and experience what life was like in the heartlands of China.
I came to China in May 2007, and lived in Huizhou for a year, a wealthy coastal city between Shenzhen and Guangzhou. At the time the above-mentioned incident took place, my only Chinese was a few useful phrases and bits and pieces of vocabulary. There are some similarities between Huizhou and Changde: both are quite small cities by Chinese standards, both have factories and Universities that they are proud of, both have very pleasant and large parks. But there are differences: I have always thought that Changde represents more of a real China. It is far away from Hong Kong, and far away from coastal boomtowns like Shenzhen. It has had less exposure to foreign influence and foreign people. Its economy is constantly growing stronger like an old tree. But most people here have a limited understanding of the outside world.
For me to get a clear picture of what is happening in China, I just have to walk outside the campus of our University. Beside the campus where I live, there are people who live in houses made of tin and even houses made of bamboo. At night, if the roads are quiet, you can hear the local KTV from outside of their little houses. Recently, as I walked past one such place late at night, there was an old woman sweeping leaves and singing along to “Make the Whole World Love Completely.” She stopped singing when she noticed me walking past. It’s moments like this that help me to see a world in this small city. It’s a mixture of ancient and modern, rich and poor, local and universal.
I chose to come to China and teach because there are not many jobs in which one can influence people. And in most of those jobs, you have to wait until you have grey hair to reach such a position. Now, ordinary Chinese people are ready to be exposed to foreign ideas and foreign people. Everywhere I go, I meet curious people. Their questions are predictable “Which country are you from? How long have you been here? Have you found a wife here yet?” But the important thing is that they want to listen to me, and they want to know what I think.
Without curiosity there is no intelligence. Having to answer personal questions everywhere can be inconvenient and uncomfortable, but it is also very empowering to meet so many people who want to listen. During the Beijing Olympics, the authorities introduced the “Eight Don’t Asks,” questions that local people should not ask foreigners, like “how old are you?” and “how much money do you earn?” but I am glad there are no such rules in Changde because it is very important that the few foreigners who live here take time to communicate with ordinary Chinese people. Last week, in a restaurant, I was approached by a man in his thirties. I could tell by the way he walked that he would approach me confidently. When he did approach me, I could tell from his accent and his use of words, that he had learnt English from Native-Speakers. This kind of person is increasing in Changde all of the time. He wanted to make a friend with me, this is because he wanted to know more about where I come from, and get more practice in my language. China is now a country that associates learning other languages with self-improvement.
Where I grew up, school children would traditionally study a modern European language, like French or German, as well as an ancient language that was no longer spoken: such as Latin or Ancient Greek. The ways in which schools teach modern languages is very different to the way they teach Ancient languages. When teaching a modern language, they would prepare us for dealing with real-life people from those countries, and understanding important cultural differences. When teaching Ancient languages, they focused on Literature, and the process of translating ancient texts, it would be unnecessary to teach a person how to converse in one of those languages. The way English is taught in Chinese public schools is much closer to the way Ancient Languages were taught in my childhood.
English is not a language that the people of Changde have daily access to. It is a very foreign language. “Foreign” is a word that doesn’t have an accurate translation into Chinese. It comes from the ancient “ferren” meaning out-of-doors But English is spoken in numerous countries, and in all of those countries except for England, it was a ‘foreign’ language before it became standard. Nothing in English can have the same meaning as ‘waiguode,’ because no English-speaking country is as populous as China, and China has a unique history and a unique relationship with the outside world. In Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, South Africa, or the UK, it is impossible to be of foreign appearance. In China, if you are black or white, it shapes your identity. A negative foreigner would complain that it is impossible to become a normal citizen here in Changde, but a positive person would use their outsider status to learn more about this ancient language and culture and develop understanding between China and the English-speaking world. There are few more important issues in the world today than establishing good relations between these two vast and varied cultures. The aim is not so that we can always agree, but so that we can understand why we sometimes disagree. Changde has given me an opportunity to play my own small part.
Two of the largest influences on Chinese life are Confucianism and Communism. In the beginning, these two schools of thought were as foreign to me as the teachings of Jesus or Plato are to a Chinese person. But there is a line from Karl Marx and a line from Confucius that can help us all to develop as people, and for understanding between China and the English-speaking world to improve. The first is from Karl Marx: “a foreign language is a weapon in the battle of life.” The second is from Confucius “don’t do to others as you wouldn’t want done to yourself．”
The sentence from Marx is not entirely wise, and not as gentle as the best of what Confucius said. But it makes the point that making an effort to know another language makes us stronger. It helps us understand why different cultures understand the world differently. It helps us deal with people who come from exotic, far-away places. Confucius lived at a time when England was populated by illiterate tribes whose languages are no longer spoken, and two thousand years before white people began to live in America. But every civilization, from Ancient Greece to the Middle-East, has words similar to those that Confucius said, and every society uses those words to guide itself morally.
I remember Confucius’ words when I go into a nearby supermarket. There is a local child who spends his time in the supermarket talking to strangers, and he pays particular attention to me. Sometimes I feel too tired to talk, but I must remember to treat this person how I would like to be treated. I have conversations with him, and sometimes it attracts an audience. I must never refuse to answer his questions about the differences between our two cultures, because it is important that this generation of children grow-up not just with a better understanding of English, but a better understanding of the countries that use it.
There is a poem on Poet’s Wall called “Some people” ． In the poem, it says

“Some people
Ride on others' backs and yell ‘I am magnificent’
Some people
Crouch and act as other people’s horse”

It is easy as foreigner in Changde to do the first of these two things: to take advantage of people, to allow strangers to pander to us, to play with young girls’ hearts. But it is much more rewarding to do the second of these things. As a foreigner in Changde, it is possible to educate people about the outside world, it is possible to satisfy people’s curiosity, it is possible to present new ideas to people, it is possible to help people grow-up.
The last two lines of the poem are:

“He who lives to make more people live more,
The people look up to him at a great height.”

In China, it is commonly believed that English is the common language of the world. But my coming here as an English teacher is not just in order to pass on knowledge. It is also for my own education. I don’t believe education is something that only happens in classrooms. It happens to all of us everywhere from birth until death. In Changde, I have found education in the strangest places, from hearing an old woman singing to herself, to answering the questions of a curious boy in the supermarket. I have also found it in magnificent places, from Poet’s Wall to the University. Self-improvement is a process that should never end. And both myself and Changde are involved in it.

Notes

2009-03-29T00:30:00.000-07:00

Reading the notes I made from some of the books I read between finishing my Masters and coming to China. Here are some quotes that jump out after two years.

From Alastair McIntosh's Soil and Soul:

The mainstream manufactures people as a monoculture. It turns people out
like
cloned rows of apple-trees on pesticide-manicured fields. The
mainstream
"trains" people by pruning. It forces growth in standardised
ways. The song that
we sing from within the mainstream is therefore not our
own song. It does not
issue from the open gates of the soul.

In Memories, Dreams and Reflections in his Chapter on Freud, Jung points out that to be ignorant of nature is to be neurotic. For example to not understand paradoxes, like cabbage thrives in dung, is to be unaware of the delicate balance that we are part of, and that we are also organisms of the soil.

Also from Soil and Soul

No place is more sacred, no people more worthy of honour, than those who have
made beauty blossom anew out of desecration.

Prosperity has blossomed anew in China, but beauty?

Later on in Soil and Soul

A large company is, indeed, a mindless monster, unless people all the way
through the system devote themselves to making it otherwise. Then, and only
then, can it start to become something like a community with values, and maybe
even something of a soul.

Jung in the chapter entitled School Years on discovering Schopenhauer:

Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for
the best in the fundaments of the universe. He spoke neither of the all-good and
all-wise providence of the Creator, nor of the harmony of the cosmos, but stated
bluntly that a fundamental flaw underlay the sorrowful course of human history
and the cruelty of nature.

Oh and, David Starkey in the Guardian article I'm reading right now: "Not to invent yourself is to be false. To follow preordained rules is a profound betrayal of what it means to be human" Take that Catholic Church and CCP!

2009-03-26T00:27:00.000-07:00

"Without Isms is neither nihilism nor eclecticism; nor is it egotism or solipsism. It opposes totalitarian dictatorship but also opposes the inflation of the self to God or Superman. It hates seeing other people trampled on like dog shit. Without Isms detests politics and does not take part in politics, but is not opposed to other people who do. If people want to get involved in politics, let them go right ahead. What Without Isms opposes is the foisting of a particular brand of politics on to the individual by means of abstract collective names such as 'the people', 'the race' or 'the nation'."
(The idea behind it is that we need to bid goodbye to the 20th century, and to put a big question mark over those "isms" that dominated it.)

Gao Xingjian

Not That You Care

2009-03-23T02:24:00.000-07:00

But here are some fractionally less dodgy recordings of my newest Chinese songs:

There'll be a post with some controversy or some saucy details about life here soon, I promise.

Feelings
Hey! We're born in order to feel
It's just the nature of mammal creatures.

Ah! Lay your head on my emaciated chest
We're all gonna end up being swallowed by the earth.

The earth may silently disappear,
Why don't you stand up and be counted?

Hoo! I'm just a monster of egotism
But I don't fail to make you sigh

Oh! You shouldn't tolerate the forceful behaviour of other lovers
But you're running out of time to choose me

Please tell me exactly what human history is?
It's just one fucking thing after another

If you are to get buried under the flagrant flowers
First at least take the opportunity to overcome your fears

Unn! The Universe doesn't care about us
This news may liberate you lover

Treat Me As One of Your Own

Several life-times ago
On the mud-covered road
I went from door to window
Seeking the help of strangers.
She came and held my weary head
She said "forget your misery"
Then treat me as one of your own
treat me as one of your own

I was the earth's enemy
Under a murky sky on a dark earth
Everybody refused to act.
She also didn't express her thoughts
She didn't consider herself or God,
All she did was fill me with peace
Then laid down her life for me
laid down her life for me

Swan

Swan, far away from home, will you ever return to where you belong?
Your Golden head and your tiny legs
are both unattainably beautiful.

At home, your potential is unfulfilled, you still want to go and change the world
The problems of our times all arise from a shortage of time
to daydream whilst scratching ourselves.

And your pitiful crying eyes,
I may never have to see again.
Optimism isn't really a virtue,
The cruel thing to do would be to comfort you.

Swan, all full of yourself. Fooled into thinking you're mature beyond your years.
Prepare for war in times of peace, your youth is already wasted
Don't spend more time dreaming.

The songs you sing are soul-stirring, I'd lay down my life for you,
The beliefs you have are like your closest friends,
As plastic as anything.

Go swimming on the street where you belong
Believing in you empties my soul of happiness
Your dreams are absolutely not satisfactory
The purpose of adult-life is actually just to survive.

I wait forever, waiting at home
You're really like the wind, the dirty dirty wind.

Room Wonderful

2009-03-13T09:02:00.000-07:00

I spend a lot of time posting and talking about things I don't like. The Grammar school I went to, the people who run the first University I went to, some unethical organisations that have employed me, the various dickheads, wankers and jerks any observant human being runs into during the day.

Those things all belong in Room 101 and I don't regret writing about them. But I should post about some of the things I've been unusally lucky to have since the turn of the Millenium.

Good Teachers I've been blessed with well over a dozen fine teachers. They weren't bullies, they weren't perverts, they weren't egomaniacs, they weren't the kind of snake-oil salesman that would tell you that success in their particular subject (thus boosting their reputation) was an indispensible ticket to success in later life.

They simply presented us with information and then got out of the way.

Slapstick comedy A better explanation of this is to watch the ending of Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters. My own explanation is "I fucking love slapstick comedy."

Dirty jokes In the words of Tommy Tiernan, the English language is like a wall between me and the world, and the word fuck is my chisel.

Libraries They're clean and convenient, you can't catch VD, they're available any time and they're absolutely free.

Laowai Blogs It's really what makes the Laowai experience liveable for me. Admittedly, some bloggers are twisted mother fuckers, but they're still fun to read.

Cyberslacking It makes my learning process very fragmentary, which suits me fine.

Any more? suggestions welcome

Can You Do Me a Favour?

2009-03-13T03:10:00.000-07:00

http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2009/03/12/is-south-park-the-most-moral-show-on-tv/

Time is very slow over here. Can somebody copy and paste this article and send it to me in a comment or an e-mail or a Facebook message?

Thankyou in advance.
Kevin

More translations of My Songs

2009-03-09T07:27:00.000-07:00

What Happens

According to the fire in my head, I'd better not believe
the freshest ideas or the ancient wisdom
I eavesdrop every night, for the music that might enlighten me.

I listen from the sewers and try my best to believe
that I hear the song of angels and see the shining stars
It seems I finally hear the only music that will ever affect me.

In books and on the road I've looked for this knowledge,
I've dreamed, I've thought, I've heard every kind of music
lived the eternal second and discovered the universe in my hand.

More mysterious than birdsong, more amazing than the waves of the sea,
The most beautiful music is the music of what happens.

More charming than laughter, more eloquent than silence,
The most beautiful music is the music of what happens.

Don't Look For Me
Please don't follow me girl, you're welcome any time to leave
There are feelings I can't express, there are feelings I can't give.
See the emotions I hide, and take them to heart,
don't look for me darling.

You're looking for a dashing young gent, you only see him when you close your eyes
You watch him ride a white horse while sniffing roses.
Only when you doubt everything can youi finally feel on top of the world,
don't look for me darling.

You would like to learn from a hero, what adulthood's really like,
You believe in the purity of youth, You are really looking forward to eulogising it.
Don't let traditional moral values prevent you from evelving,
don't look for me darling.

You thought my mind had touched your perfect body,
but your soul I can't see, your heart I can't understand.
You have an opportunity to start a fresh life, lose me in the polluted wind,
don't look for me darling.

Songs

2009-03-09T05:46:00.001-07:00

I've put some extremely rudimentary recordings of the Mandarin songs I wrote onto Youtube with a view to making professional recordings as soon as I can afford to.

Here are translations of the titles and lyrics along with links to Youtube. Those of you with any experience of Mandarin will appreciate that it's a very easy language to rhyme in so it seems wasteful to play with the nets down.

Oh Well Never Mind
As he sees it, the guests at the party are all wonderful,
but so called civility closes the door on his head,
By the river side, he sits alone in the moonlight,
and drinks to the memories that never materialised.

Everything reminds him that death is persevering,
He has thought about this everywhere, including the bathroom floor.

He treats others as he wants to be treated, but can't be bothered learning people skills
The people who understand his deep, dark eyes, he can count on one hand.
On far-away roads, as if deep in thought, he walks terribly slowly,
racks his brain in thinking of ways to make the world a livelier place.

He's nostalgic for a time yet to come
Forever refusing to stop crafting gentleness.

Doesn't dedicate his life to saying what he doesn't mean
He seizes the opportunity to do the right thing.
Oh well never mind, oh well never mind, oh well never mind.

The Truth of Love
Give me a look at the truth, what does real love involve?
Some people believe love is an adventure,
Some people reply that's just seeing the world from one's own point-of-view
Some lovers feel their breath's been taken away,
Some lovers feel that their progress has been stunted.

Before I reach old-age I need the courage to discover,
The less I stick in the mud the more experienced I become
Let's appreciate the value of time, come and drift away with me
Let's really believe love can change our lives.

The poets would have us believe love is a baeutiful dream,
The doctors would have us believe it's a bodily function,
According to the broken-hearted love is just a form of weakness,
According to the wise, nobody knows the truth.

I've asked old men, I've asked madly-in-love teenagers,
To my disappointment it was the same story every time.
I've walked loves' forbidden zones and been a stranger in a foreign land
I formally announce that I will never think things through again.

Express yourself to this outsider, hug the zeitgeist, come with me back to our roots,
Let's not give a damn about fate, let's progress towards our ancestors.

Real love can't possible fix everything, the truth is not the slightest bit pure,
Let's end our ambitions, broaden our horizons, begin to acknowledge the whole wide world.

Please don't bother telling me that the recordings suck balls

Too Busy Living

2009-03-06T08:43:00.000-08:00

Here's an indicator as to why I'm too busy living at the moment to post regularly. This is what a new Student posted to my qq e-mail address:

Dear kevin,
I am so excited
that you did not refuse to add me to your friends's file.
My name is Brave lee, but I was
not brave at all. I am now study at the east part of the Art and Science
University , It would take me nearly half an hour to get to the west part,
but I believe that I will get something more or less if I try my best in your
class.
I used to be a lonely man.
I am too shy to talk to others, especial for girls. Because I have no
strongpoint, and I do poorly in my grade. I am not handsome, and I can not
even play any of the popular sport well.
I acted as if I were cool, and I
would never greet a person unless he or she call me first, because
it would be so embarass when I call a person and he don't feel like to rap
to me , it almost the worst thing for me . I smoke when I was depressed and in
despair, that's maybe the reason why I seemed not so friendly as I really was.
To tell the truth, its not right to smoke for this age, at least I think
so.
My college life is not so colorful
as expected. Not all the students are so friendly, and a lot of them are waste
of their time here. They play the online games all the time and always skip
classes for them. When asked what they want to be in the future or what
they have learnt this year, they don't know how to answer. Prehaps they just try
to escape reality through the games. If the reality was not so cruelty, there
would not be so many people abandon themselves to the online
games.
I ask my self again and again,
am I too rigorous to my classmates , my friends, my relatives and myself?
Unfortunately, the answer hadn't been clear untill I read a book about
psychological. And then, only then, I beginned to be on to my own
fault.
No body is perfect, and I also have a
lot of disadvantages, and this is why the world is so colorful and so attactive.
So I start to persaude myself to adapt it , to love it. It's not a easy
job for me at first, but I feel the others are better for me than I
expected bit by bit. The world is more beatiful when I wake up in the
morning.
Now I think I am brave enough
to greet the others , including girls. Of course, I am not so popular and there
are still some pepole don't feel like to talk to me. But I meet a lot new
friends in this way, what makes me much more happy than
before.
I decided to take part in your
class when I heard my English teacher mention it. I think it is a chance to
improve my speaking skill and make friends. My first new friend is LiWenjun, he
is a sunny boy. And we have been partner for twice, and I will be his partner
whenever he want.
Last night in
your class, I met a beautiful girl , she is not study in our college and
she was late for class too.She is new here and she hadn't got a book. I
asked her what her name is and if she mind to sit beside me so that we can
read my book together. She agreed and came to sit with me . She told me where
she came from and asked me some questions. But I can't remeber her name now,
.......I didn't ask her number because I don't think it polite to ask a stranger
her number.
Next week I will make a
speech in your class, so I have to spent an hour or more to prepare it .
By the way , your teaching skill is wonderful and it is really a
feast to listen to it. I want to make friends with you, not only because
you are a foreigner, but also because I admire the people who go far away from
home to realize their dreams. They overcome all the dificulties, and they made
their dreams come true in the end. These moving stories only happens in the
movie in the past, but now I know you are one of them.
I hope one day, your dream will come true
and you will be famous. Whenever you feel down , or something
troublesome
happens to you, just think that you are very success now,
and be confident . A lot of your students and your friend are ready to help you.
And if someone said something bad to you, forget it , they just don't kown your
feelings and just treat them as silly birds .

And one day , my dream will also come true . I
believe.

love from Brave Lee

Here is my reply

Wow, that's beautiful. I really don't know what to say. You say my teaching skills are wonderful. Actually, I have had many days, and I still have days when I don't know what to say or do in the classroom. Growing as a person and improving at your job always means working hard and learning from your own mistakes.
I never look, and I don't care what my Students' grades are. People are important, their grades are not.

Happy Birthday to Me

2009-02-06T22:49:00.001-08:00

http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/index.php?module=see&lang=uk&code=271a53f0097d253302fed347e5ecab88

Hatred

2009-02-04T08:01:00.000-08:00

In recent weeks, in various frustrations I've been reading some English language China-blogs. As China Bounder points out, living as a Laowai brings out the worst in many men. We all have it in us to be arrogant, abusive, condescending, and brutish towards women, but China makes this permissible, and in many cases, seem normal.

The above-mentioned blog is loaded with attacks on the CCP and the Middle-Classes of China. But its primary tool at fulfilling its purpose (pissing off Chinese men) is its tales of the sexual adventures of its author (seemingly one or two men in their fifties who live in Shanghai). They also collaborated to write this book.

Then there is a blog by expat women to share tales of douchebag expat men that make me grateful for the lack of an expat community where I live.

To quote Bill Hicks: "Have some self-respect. Stay at home and jerk off."

But I don't just wish to blog abou the sex-lives of Laowais. Although that is related to the hatred between some expats and some Chinese.

One point that Chinabounder makes is that the instincts behind Socialism are indicative of the nobleness in the human-character. But, he continues, it's a sick and sad joke to suggest that China is or ever was a society that sought justice for its weakest members. To illustrate this, he points out that ordinary Chinese generally don't give a cuntsuck about each other: He claims that this is evidenced in the way they drive, the way they regulate factory-production, the way they manage mines, the way they use schools to control rather than to educate.

You may think that's true, but when you walk down the street as a Laowai, you meet with every reaction except for indifference. People closely watch what you do, and listen to what you say. Surely this is an opportunity to knock back their predudice and influence people.

What becomes easy to forget in all of the isolation, idle curiosity and mockery is the unexceptionality of China's 老百姓 or ordinary people. Laowais often complain about or praise the predictability of human-interaction here. It's very easy to predict how teenage punks, 30-something yuppies, teenage girls, etc. will react to seeing you, and what they will say if you take the time to listen to them. Therefore it can easily be argued that talking to most people is a big fat waste of time, but but but but but, is that not the same anywhere?

Teaching in China has reinforced one thing I learnt in four years in Higher and Post-Graduate Education. Our species, in its natural state, is a big mindless blob and we live in a particularly unsophisticated time. To do anything worthwhile requires crawling out of the swamp of our instincts.

Standard

2009-01-25T07:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzMIKsrjcOI&feature=related

Have a look at this, it's all worth watching but the bit beginning on 6:00 is especially powerful.

Chinese has a word 标准 biaozhun meaning "standard." Beijing people have the most standard Mandarin. To be good at karaoke your singing must be standard (meaning as close to the original as possible.) People in Guangdong and Xinjiang prefer to converse in their local dialects, therefore their Mandarin isn't very standard.

In spite of being a frequent target of the pronunciation police, I think Mandarin is a quickly evolving language that's full of poetry. I've been doing a lot more creative writing in Mandarin recently than in English.

And when I think of the kinds of people mentioned in the video, I wonder why I've been so keen to work in Higher Education in Britain. The discipline and self-motivation of the Students at this University, and the fact that many of them to pursue other subjects simply for the love of learning, despite the enormous exam pressure. This is in marked contrast to my experiences at University.

One of the biggest misconceptions about TEFL teaching in China is that it's a way of escaping working for the man. Yes, there are fairy-tale elements to it: contracts are short; there is no obligation to be a respectable member of the community (attempting to become one is a waste of time); you probably have more freetime than a school teacher in the English-speaking country of your origin, but you are working for an Industry.

The existence of this Industry, English teaching in China, has made it a subconscious, subrational response among the ordinary Chinese to say "hello" when they see a Caucasian or a black person. As well as its dedicated professionals, this Industry has its share of chancers and unscrupulous people. Being able to afford a foreign teacher is a bit like being able to afford a star in the old Hollywood studio system. Your selling-power depends on it.

The thing I've learnt to respect the most after working in this industry for 18 months is defiance of cliche. Most of my Students have memorised their English in blocks. After class, almost all of them choose to converse with me in Chinese, because their English is a functioning machine rather than a means of self-expression.

To help them get to the next stage, it's important to remind them that the Chinese for the verb "to master" is 学好 or 学会 study well, or study to the point of being able to. This knowledge is not something that you can buy like a car, a language is like a muddy stream, so just strip and jump in.

Not Giving a Fuck

2009-01-24T13:37:00.000-08:00

My French teacher at St. Ambrose, Mr.Toal once accused me of not caring. I denied it instinctively.

On one of his seemingly spontaneous, but actually very loaded mid-lesson musings, he reflected that part of the shape of life was to start work, realise how tough the real world is, and think "St Ambrose isn't so bad."

Since leaving St Ambrose at the earliest legal opportunity in 2000:

I had a part-time job during my A-Levels working in a noisy, sweaty hotel kitchen as the lowest member of the staff food-chain but I have never thought "St Ambrose isn't so bad."

I have had a summer job working in a bleach factory where health and safety standards were Dickensian, and one had to slide along the floor instead of walk for fear of slipping but I have never thought "St Ambrose isn't so bad."

I have been riding a scooter on a rainy afternoon and been tossed onto the roof of a car whose driver pulled out in front simply because he was bigger than me but I have never thought "St Ambrose isn't so bad."

I have worked as a door-to-door salesman and been turned away at first glance from homes where I could here the laughter coming from the paddling pool, and smell the freshly barbecued meat, but I have never thought "St Ambrose isn't so bad."

I have come to China and lived as the ultimate ethnic minority. I have learnt Chinese and heard first hand accounts of life during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward but I have never thought "St Ambrose isn't so bad"

I could go on, with a student-house that was the ultimate cultural wasteland, being out of love by text-message, staying in a bullet-proof windowed motel in Chicago, spending the night in Hong Kong without a hotel room, losing over a thousand pounds on an e-bay fraud, but I have never thought "St Ambrose isn't so bad."

During my last two months at the school, one Student stuck his head out of the upstairs window of the bus and yelled "Mr Haworth's gay." Mr Haworth gave a fuck. This was during the last stretch of preparation for our GCSEs, which we all gave a fuck about. The importance of our final lessons did not stop the Headmaster of the school from pulling boys out of their lessons to fill out incident forms, face interrogation, and help discover the identity of the boy who had shouted "Mr Haworth's gay."

As an aside, Mr Haworth had recently established himself as an adulterer and a homewrecker. But still, we were expected to give a fuck about finding the culprit.

I believe that people who tell children that school days are the best days of their lives are bullies.

I believe that schools redirect kids' talent and enthusiasm towards things that very few will find worth giving a fuck about.

I believe that its lack of 'real world'ness was the very thing that made St Ambrose a miserable place for many Students who went there in my time.

I believe that there are imposters, bullies, and incompetents in every profession, but school is the only time when we're required to respect them.

The reason I am not a forceful teacher is not because I like the Students. They, and I, are just pawns in a vast, indifferent system. But because I explain to them that ultimately, this is their deal. I can help them to memorise pieces of literature, but only when they've experienced the emotions involved will they understand them. I can give them topics to discuss in class but only when those issues have touched their lives will they know what they think of them. No Student should ever thank me for how much they have learnt, they should thank themselves.

Since leaving St Ambrose, I have found things that I do give a fuck about: Mandarin, creative writing, classical guitar, and (most recently) karaoke. But I can only reach my full potential at those things when I shed inhibitions, realise and accept limitations, and cease to give a fuck about those things.

The seventh resolution

2009-01-16T14:59:00.000-08:00

Read more literature and less literary criticism

That most lyrical of boatsmen, Mark Twain, once wrote:

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river.

In River Town Peter Hessler explains why he came to China aged 26, instead of starting a career:

At Princeton I had majored in English, and after graduation I had spent two years studying English language and literature at Oxford. My original plan had been to become a Professor of Literature, but over time I became less enamored of what I saw in English departments, especially in America. Part of it was simply aesthetics - I found that I couldn't read literary criticism, because its academic stiffness was so far removed from the grace of good writing. And I could make very little sense of most criticism, which seemed a hopeless mess of awkward words: Deconstructionalism, Post-modernism, New Historicism...And I resented the way that English departments constantly tinkered with the canon, hoping to create a book list as multicultural as the fake photographs they put on the covers of their undergraduate brochures.

In The History Boys Richard Griffiths tells the Students to familiarise themselves with the poems now. Of course they hadn't lived through the things that the poems were about: love, war, misery, heartbreak. But someday they would, and some of the poems would make sense.

There is a time to analyse literature and a time to live it.

When I am in the park studying, strangers often come to see what the Laowai is reading. There are well over 100 Chinese poems that if you say the first line, even a working-class person will be able to finish it for you. The same goes for songs. These poems are about love, nostalgia, homesickness, death, things that can't be learnt in a classroom, but life teaches them the meaning of the poems. Despite the popularity of television, the poverty of the countryside, and the noise of the cities. They have the ability to hear the rhythm of a poem that all of the well-educated Westerners I know have lost.

Hessler later writes about an epiphany when a piece of Shakespeare that he had formally studied 10 years before made sense for the first time in the silence of a Fuling classroom:

You couldn't have said something like that at Oxford. You couldn't simply say: I don't like Hamlet because I think he's too conservative and sensitive and selfish. Everything had to be more clever than that; you had to recognize Hamlet as a character in a text, and then you had to dismantle it accordingly, layer by layer, not just the play itself but everything that had been written about it. You had to consider what all the other critics had said, and the accumulated weight of their knowledge and nonsense sat heavily on the play. You had to think about how the play tied in with current events and trends. This process had some value, of course, but for many readers it seemed to have reached the point where there wasn't even a split-second break before the sophistication started. As a student, that was all I had wanted - a brief moment when a simple and true thought flashed across the mind: I don't like this character. This is a good story. The woman in this poem is beautiful and I bet her fingers are slim like scallions.

I taught the song "Turn Turn Turn" just before Christmas. There's a time to read, a time to write; a time to think, a time to live; a time to criticise, a time to surrender.

New Year's Resolutions

2008-12-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

1. Give Less of a Fuck
Don't confuse this attitude with nihilism - the most current form of human cowardice. I mean there are things that a person might worry about: reputation; causing offence to other people; the standard of service offered to customers. But life is way too short to be eager to please, and you can't please wankers, so don't try. And most people have undesirable criteria for being pleased anyway. But don't listen to me, watch this

2. Finish my second novella
This will require sacrificing other worthwhile activities, and maybe one or two friendships too. There are always excuses for delaying such things, but you can't wait to be old enough or wise enough. The future is now.

3. Finish Anything Goes: An Advanced Reader of Modern Chinese
It doesn't sound like a tall order to finish one textbook in the space of 1 year. But I am living in a 花花世界（lit. Flower-flower world） a world of temptations so this will require willpower and involve fluctuations in enthusiasm.

4. Worry less about love
These things usually happen best when unforced. And living in the mysterious East has taught me that there's nothing natural or inevitable about how sex-obsessed our Anglo-American culture is. I have never been to Australia, and never watched a cricket match but I can't stop watching this

5. Push myself musically
I'm unlikely to improve as a guitarist, but my new hobby is learning and writing Chinese songs. I have no idea what this will lead to, but I like it a lot.

6. Just Do It
This is closely tied in with number 1. But as Baz Luhrman said in Sunscreen, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself too much either. Most of what you do is a matter of chance. On my Chinese blog, I recently wrote a post entitled "Words without Translation" words in both languages that had no translation into the other. One word I forgot to mention was "geek." In China, the concepts of looking down upon the bookish, or separating the real world from the world of books are very foreign. To illustrate this point, most people use the Sui dynasty poem 书中自有黄金屋/书中自有颜如玉 "In books there is always a Golden house, in books there is always a beautiful woman." I just like to use the fact that they're realy fucking into reading books to illustrate this. Nobody who has lived, or knows of the recent history of this country could be unaware of the limitations of being a 读书人 lit. "read-books person" or intellectual.
Anyway, I'm not sure where this is going, but somehow it leads to the conclusion, if you want to achieve something, just get the fuck on with achieving it.

2008

2008-12-15T02:28:00.000-08:00

If anybody still reads this blog, I encourage them to reply with their own answers.

Most Interesting Thing You Have Learnt
With learning a language, my growth in knowledge is much more obvious than in previous years. But I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of useful shit as well.
There's a particularly enchanting Chinese song that I sang at KTV the other night. Learning how to sing it hasn't made it any less mysterious. That is the response that springs to mind and I ain't gonna redraft this blog post.

Most interesting person you have met
Almost as much as the Southwestern bookselling experience, I've conversed with a higher volume of new people than some people do in an entire lifetime. But there's much more opportunity to get to know the person than when trying to sell them something, overall I'll go for Huizhou Train Station Lady, but there are numerous possible candidates who would be equally deserving.

Best Place You Have Been To
My current bedroom has a special place in my heart. Apart from the absence of any heating, it has no obvious defect.

Proudest achievement
It would be nothing related to teaching as I still have good days and bad days. It would be starting (and finishing) "Chinese Language and Culture" or finally getting my ass back onto Youtube. However imperfectly I did both of those things, it's still a huge step to have got them done.

Laughed hardest when
I asked a Student to describe an important friend in her life, and she went on to describe Adolf Hitler. For the next lesson, I got hold of a Chinese translation of "First They Came For the Jews" and read it out to the whole class.

Was at my lowest when
I broke up and had the most bone-chilling helloooooo-oooo within the space of a few seconds

Best Film You Watched
I'm now a card-carrying member of the Youtube generation, but the only trip I took to the cinema was a worthy one, so I'll say "The Dark Knight"

Best Book You Read
Again, I seem to be finished with books as physical objects, I have a pathetic showing compared to 2006, but I'll say for fiction The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton and for non-fiction Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler.

Best Memory
It's been an incredible year, I say that every year, but 2007 was a non-starter by comparison, but it would have to be saying farewell to the Students in Longchuan. We did karaoke and played Chinese party games in a hall usually reserved for the solemnest lectures, I'm sure you can easily picture what such a hall looks like.

Now I'm not normally comfortable with the idea of being obsessed over but...

2008-12-14T05:20:00.000-08:00

but I'll translate this blog post about me by an 18 year-old English Major to the best of my ability http://user.qzone.qq.com/291566387/blog/1229250150
For reasons unknown to me, it was set out like a poem, so I won't deviate from the original. It has the quality of freewriting that reminds me of my most prolific period of blogging back in late 2005

Yesterday I went out with Kevin
Originally I expected him to have an entourage
But when I got to the school gate, he was alone
He took me to eat at a hotpot place
Unfortunately my skin is too sensitive
I couldn't eat that stuff.
I just sat and watched him eat
I watched him use chopsticks which was somewhat amusing
So I took it upon myself to try to help him.
He let me have a look at his notepad
He's written a Chinese song
I helped him correct the mistakes in his writing
His Chinese handwriting is just like a child-
How cute.
He was also learning a Chinese song
"Let the Whole World Love Completely"
After he'd finished eating we waited for xiaolong at the Technical School gates
Kevin used his gloves to wipe a place for me to sit
He's really worthy of the title "English gentleman!"
There a few strangers who only dared to say "hi" to Kevin
He had no opportunity to be friendly to them
Together we went to KTV.
He allowed his acquaintances in there to address him as orangutan
Ahh!
He sang the Chinese songs "Courage" "Allow the World to Love Completely" and "Let's sail together in a little row boat"
I quite admire him.
It was there that I discovered he has been different to us all along.
Cultural differences prevent him from understanding our behaviour
From now on, we must work together
to create some beautiful memories for him in Changde.

Remember...

2008-11-30T15:10:00.000-08:00

If Laowais made up a significant percentage of the population, then bumper stickers saying "Honk if you have a small penis" would be mass-produced.

Letters to a Young Waijiao

2008-11-25T20:52:00.000-08:00

You don't have to be good at Chinese to know that 老师 'teacher' and 外教 'foreign teacher' are two different words. You don't have to be inexperienced with China to find this creepy.

Here are my seriously fallible points about how not to act. They run contrary to what many people with China-experience will tell you, and maybe I will change my mind on some of them. But here goes:

1. Don't believe what people say about you
You're probably not a wealthy, well-connected person with loose sexual morals. Although most Chinese people will think that you are.

2. Don't feel you have to tolerate your linguistic identity
Finding opportunities to converse in Chinese can be an uphill struggle. Lots of people see you as a toy to practise English with, others will not be able to get their head around the fact that a foreigner speaks their language, and therefore not understand a word of your perfect Mandarin. Be firm and be thick-skinned.

3. Hello is not a swear word after all
This is easy to forget after being in China for a while. No words are bad, it is the way people use them that is bad. "Hello" is a word that is capable of a lot of friendliness and even tenderness.

4. Teaching oral English is a kind of performance
Language teaching always has a visual element to it anyway. I once got indignant about being required to be different to their Chinese teachers, but Chinese youngsters are generally a lot more passive than what a Western person might be used to. "The best teacher makes you forget that there's a teacher in the room" is a good sentiment, but it simply can't work in a class of more than a dozen students. They're looking to you - perform.

5. You are merely leading horses through water
Your school may try to convince you that you are at fault if some Students are uncooperative, or blaming you for unsatisfying progress. I have been directly involved with formal learning for all but a few months of my life, and in my experience, a person who is not self-motivated will simply not learn. You can't build an ark for everyone.

6. You are not the Messiah - honestly
You are here to do a job, not to make dreams come true. The education system here is corrupt in a way that will take more than a generation to fix.

7. You are a plaything - get used to it
You might be an excellent teacher, but that's not why you're sought after. You might be excellent at Chinese, but that also isn't why you are sought after. You are wanted because of wht you look like and the linguistic identity that it carries. People in authority will often seem corrupt and indifferent to/ignorant of the learning process. They might well be. But that doesn't make them terrible people, they were fucked up in their turn by fools in old-style trench-coats.

2008-11-24T19:57:00.000-08:00

Part of being an adult is to not believe that there is always a power above us that gives a shit about us.

At various times, I have had sleepless nights worried about displeasing the Catholic Church, various academic institutions, and businesses.

None of those organiations is damaged by lone individuals who struggle to obey. None will expend any energy on judging me harshly.

If there is a God, he is clearly not an all-powerful and ever-loving creator who intervenes in our daily lives and judges us if we thing naughty things about the neighbour's wife.

They Students of this University are forced to obey, without ever being given a satisfactory reason why. The people they are accountable to go all the way from their own roommates to the party cadres who only appear a couple of times a year to make lengthy speeches.

To make the best of one's opportunities in such nakedly indifferent and self-serving surrounding is an act of rebellion.

Perspiration

2008-11-16T04:28:00.000-08:00

I've always maintained that blogging is not the pursuit of happy, fulfilled people. The two times when I've blogged prolifically are: 1. Just before I came to China and I had nothing to do and 2. When I lived in Longchuan and needed to share some thoughts with the English speaking world.

Now it appears I've just experienced the end of a relationship that barely began(I don't intend to be out of the game for long).

I read an article in the Guardian this morning that's about genius, but I read as being about "excellence".

It says that to become excellent at something one must practise for about 10,000 hours over a space of 10 years.

Fuck it!

Oh, by the way, I finally added more Youtube videos http://www.youtube.com/kmcgeary

Joe the Plumber

2008-11-05T07:38:00.000-08:00

I came across an interview with Joe Wurzelbacher in the Guardian posted just after Ohio was called for Obama.

Wurzelbacher said: "You know, fame is fleeting, leaves you hungry, leaves you cold, leaves you tired. Fortune never comes with it."

The privileges and special attention that come with being a Laowai are starting to make me deal with strangers in ways I never thought I was capable of.

After being a door-to-door salesman, I know something about the early adulthood realization that one isn't special, and the world is only interested in us in terms of what it can use us for.

Especially now that I have a girlfriend, in recent weeks I've had to be firm with several young adults, from friends all the way to complete strangers, that their situation - keenness to improve their English and familiarise themselves with Western Culture - doesn't make 'em special, and doesn't entitle them to special attention.

I've been writing a lot about this on my Chinese blog, and had a few angry responses, especially considering as I've written a lot about the virtues of foreign language acquisition too. But when one has a blog that has a large and varied readership, one must pause to remind people that this is just another means of communication, and probably not the best way to get familiar with a person's real character.

I've been bringing my guitar into class in recent weeks, mostly to practise the use of abstract nouns like "nostalgia" and "ecstasy." And I've also tried to use music to demonstrate how humans are innately irrational. I could just as easily have used a Presidential Election campaign, or the latest (excellent) episode of South Park to demonstrate the same thing: available here

Last night, as I was about to fall asleep, I remembered this passage from Call of the Wild that I first read when I was 18. I subsequently realised that it would be perfect to paraphrase for the beginning of my new novella.

there is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive - Jack London

攀越生命的高峰和极限是令人着迷的，但这样的心情在生活中也是矛盾的，因为这份魅力只有在人最活跃的时候存在，而且必须完全忘我
There's the best translation I came across.

As well as illustrating that despite being happy and moved with the election result, and the footage that has come back from America. I am still highly mistrustful of any kind of mob mentality, not just the reactions I get here in China, the kinds of things I've always had apprehensions about: Socialism, Christianity, Obamamania...

Orwell said (something like): "The purpose of Political language is to make lies sound truthful, and murder respectable, and give the impression of solidity to pure wind." "Change" and "Yes we can" have no more solidity than "4 more years!" did.

Vampires

2008-10-20T08:20:00.000-07:00

When trying to achieve something positive, it is adviseable to avoid vampires. That is, people who suck life out of things, but don't breathe anything back in.

The generation of Chinese born since 1980, especially those born after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 are widely known as "The Little Emperors."

The two obvious reasons are systemised birth control and an increase in prosperity that had once been unthinkable. Many children have four grandparents and no siblings, and grow accustomed to being pandered to. It's not unusual to come across a young Chinese person who has wildly unreasonable ideas about how important they are, and how much time you should give them.

I could go on about how the Chinese have historically placed a lot of hope in their children, but that's not what I want to focus on.

The world has many useless people who simply aren't going anywhere, but when it comes to kids what can one do? I tell myself that the only moral and sensible thing to do is to leave them the fuck alone and give them time to daydream, a much more effective study-method than the ones in practise here. But that's seldom an option in China.

Compared to the generation that was young in the 1960s, the young Chinese that I work with all day every day, are self-confident, hungry for knowledge, and low on hypocrisy. But I wish I could be seen by more people for what I am - somebody who came to this University JUST to do a job.

2008-10-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

God's Grandeur
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS8vtivQuaw

Baijiu

2008-10-12T08:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening. I brought my guitar to a friend's house to give him and his friends a listen. His wife and son were out of town so they were taking the opportunity to have a mini school reunion and I was the entertainment.

I drank about half a bottle of brandy, and then started drinking baijiu.

I woke up this morning, in my own bed, but I have no recollection of what happened after I started drinking baijiu.

I must have had the presence of mind to make my own way home, or the Chinese-speaking ability to tell them where to take me, but I need to find out what happened

2008-10-08T22:36:00.000-07:00

In River Town Peter Hessler wrote of his time livng in a remote, impoverished part of China:

“I had never had any idealistic illusions about my Peace Corps ’service’ in China; I wasn’t there to save anybody or leave an indelible mark on the town. If anything, I was glad that during my two years in Fuling I hadn’t built anything, or organized anything, or made any great changes to the place. I had been a teacher, and in my spare time I had tried to learn as much as possible about the city and its people. That was the extent of my work, and I was comfortable with those roles and I recognized their limitations.”

He lived there in the days before having a QQ number was as common as having hot water, and before it was the norm to own a mobile phone.

This evening, I entered a classroom that looked like what it was. The classroom of 30Students who have a barely qualified teacher, with greaseblock walls and a concrete floor.
Everywhere I go, people ask me a question I doubt they have ever asked before: "can I be your friend?" a question I don't have the energy to deconstruct several times a day. It's very much the opposite of the life Peter Hessler claims to have chosen for himself. He was hungry for knowledge, and I'm greedy for it. And I want everybody to know.

But as it is, I'm starting more friendships than I could ever possibly sustain, and getting more enviable opportunities than I could possibly take advantage of.
The only pressure is the pressure I put on myself, and it's great to live in a place where nobody talks about the good old days. Clearly for me, these are the good old days

2008-09-12T20:42:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I will take my guitar to a new friends' house. As well as playing some of the classical guitar pieces that I always play, I've printed off the chords and lyrics to some pop and folk songs that I think he'll like.

There's a lyric in Going Nowhere by Oasis that says:

I'm gonna be a millionaire
so can you take me there
wanna be wild
cause my life's so tame

When I was 16 and hearing these songs, I would daydream about an unknown date when I would be performing them, or something of my own of a similar power. Now however, it is a privilege just to know that these songs exist.

In "Amadeus," Salieri describes an early work by Mozart as being "filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing."

The book that I'm currently starting to write begins with a scene that is largely based on memory, but almost everything about the memory I find indescribable. The 2 solutions I can think of are to either be deliberately unfathomable, as in 'la filia che piange' by TS Eliot; or to be minimalistic about what one chooses to describe.

I'll attempt both, and let time sort out which is better.

This is It

2008-09-10T11:03:00.001-07:00

I'm doing it. I'm going to write creatively again. The first scene of my new...thing... is at a funeral, I don't really know much after that. You heard it here first.

I'm in Hunan, Changde now. Everything's too new to really have, let alone express opinions yet. And most pleasent experiences I find unbloggable, so from this day forward, No News is good news.

But I will occasionally need a window to shout through, and express things that wouldn't be appropriate to express on my Chinese blog so you'll be hearing from me here again.

2008-07-20T03:12:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton. Here's the dialogue of Syme getting recruited as an undercover detective.

"I really have no experience," he began.
"No one has any experience," said the other, "of the battle of Armageddon."
"But I am really unfit-"
"You are willing, that is enough," said the unknown.
"Well, really," said Syme, "I don't know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test.'
"I do," said the other- "martyrs."

This book expresses hatred of two advanced ideas of Chesterton's age (it was published in 1908). The advanced ideas are:
1. Good and evil are social constructions and not universal and sacred.
2. Great art must shock and upset people.

There are numerous passages that make you want to stop and applaud, or dog-ear the page as I did. Here are some:

he knew that his enemy was a terrible fighter, and that probably his last hour had come.
He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the grass under is feet; he felt the love of life in all living things. He could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost fancy that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and breaking into blossom in the meadow - flowers blood-red and burning gold and blue, fulfilling the whole pageant of the spring.

The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes ojected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule mankind, if I could feel for once, that you had suffered a real agony, such as I-

As well as being thrilling, it's helped me crystallise some ideas that might help me finally get on with this second novella I'm trying to write. To place anarchism against conservatism; radicalism against moderation; youth against age; folk religion against strict orthodoxy; and see what comes out in the end. I think my time as a teacher and my recent trip to Ireland gave me a strong enough cast of characters, and a book of folk tales I read over a year ago gave me the skeleton of a story. So fingers crossed.

Oh, my Chinese blog is very slow an difficult to access on this proxy but it's http://user.qzone.qq.com/939859361

Misconceptions of China

2008-07-17T23:55:00.001-07:00

Those who travel to China form lots of misconceptions of the place and many take these misconceptions back to the mysterious West and spread them. I would like to balance out these malicious lies with some of my own.
They are all debatable but some are barely even matters of opinion.

Strangers approaching you speaking English=friendly
Strangers muttering about you in front of you=rude and uncultured

It's a common occurence, particularly in towns full of University Students to have young and attractive people approach you with the sentence "would you like me to be your translator?" or more bluntly "can I help you?"
Does this mean that they roam the streets all day offering help to able-bodied adults who appear to be minding their own business? or cripples, or beggars, or old ladies? I never even saw a Chinese person acknowledge a stranger who wasn't of foreign appearance.
As for those who talk about you in front of you, well that also happens to me in the English-speaking world, so it never really bothered me. But as I got to a level where I understood what most of them were saying I realised that things like "he's so handsome" and "I can't approach him, my English is fucking rubbish" are much more common than racial slurs (I'll get to racial slurs in a minute if I remember). It's if they go into the local dialect that they're probably taking the piss.

Many people lack inquisitiveness and initiative. This is the result of Communist tyranny, and more recently, vapid consumerism
Read up on ancient Chinese history and mythology. This is not an exclusively modern phenomenon. And is it really exclusively Chinese anyway?

Western style industrialisation/consumerism is stripping Chinese culture of everything that was once valuable about it
At both leaving parties in Longchuan, Students (aged 16-19) were pouring coke into paper cups and gan beiing* to the time about to pass and for the things that are yet to come. That's coca-cola or pepsi, there were both on the table. My mental image of them raising their cups and then draining them in unison is a very unusual real-life example of innocence and justifiable optimism.

Although Coke has been available in China for well under a century, and ganbeiing beer and baijiu dates back into the mists of time, the latter is unhealthy, unpleasant, and (as far as I'm aware) completely unnecessary.

*ask a Chinese friend what ganbeiing is.

Chinese people drive selfishly
They drive like idiots. Most drivers don't wear seatbelts, most motorcyclists don't wear helmets, and the lawlessness of the roads would disgust Sergio Leone. But clearly it's not selfish. It's more like, self-destructive.

Chinese people don't discuss, or express opinions on, major issues in public places
You just have to learn the language and enjoy earwigging other peoples' conversations to know that this is simply not true. As with anywhere, the majority of people prefer to chat shit about nothing than to put the world to rights.

In China, image and presentation are everything. Genuine quality is nothing
In history, for example during the SARS outbreak in 2003, obsession with keeping up appearances, has done great damage.
But just because some people live beyond their means (having lived in America I can't imagine anybody doing such a thing), and few people, however friendly, ever actually invite you into their living quarters. It's not necessarily because their living quarters are shamefully squalid, it might be because you have B.O.

Chinese girls (aged 16-25)fall neatly into two categories, traditional and westernized
Let's do an association of common words attached to these two archetypes:
TRADITIONAL-refined, virginal, uptight, remote, can sing but can't dance, hypocritical, virtuous, incorruptible, giggly, irritating
WESTERNISED-bubbly, promiscuous, talkative, honest, vibrant, confident, potentially mad, can dance but make white men look rhythmic, confident, giggly, irritating

I suppose I met a few girls who fell neatly into one category or the other, but people are much more interesting and adaptable than that.

Although appearance and face are very important in China, we should refrain from judging people by their appearance
Well, you shouldn't comlpetely judge anybody by their appearance, of course. But what about these guys who dye their hair orange and shape it like a pineapple. They've taken time and effort to look like a complete douche. Of course it says a lot about them.

There is a connection between the level of noise pollution and the fact that it's a totalitarian state
In any Chinese city, there is an obscene amount of noise from shouting, car horns, and really loud, really shit music.
In the early days, I thought this was because the subjects of a tyranny are frightened of the sound of their own thoughts. But then, I realised that the noise was made with consistency, regularity, and efficiency, so is probably not the responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party.

I'll get onto the issues of the role of the foreigner and the very real problem of racism, if and when I can be bothered.

2008-07-15T08:04:00.000-07:00

I'm off home tomorrow. I'm in Hong Kong now. It's two weeks since I wound up in Longchuan and I've been mostly ill since then. I've also started a blog in Chinese, so to those who are interested, I will post a link as soon as I know how.

I have however, (re)discovered the work of Ivor Biggun to prepare me for home.

Just as Longchuan is rel China, Ivor Biggun is real England. Bring it on

Stuff

2008-07-02T06:34:00.000-07:00

In one of his immortal sketches, George Carlin ranted about stuff.

Today, I had the end-of-term party for the other middle-school I teach in. The one on the other side of the river (tracks).

I gave a much lengthier speech in Chinese. Last time, the last few sentences were drowned out by applause, but this time everybody listened to every word. In the absence of a guitar, one of the Students held their MP3 player up to the microphone to impovise a karaoke session (in their school assembley hall).

The whole thing is indescribable.

Among the stuff I've been given, there are lots of traditional Chinese stuff, a map of China from a student called Shayne Ward (because I said I would love to travel China if I had the chance), and countless letters, cards and photographs.

It's all stuff that one can never wish to dispose of.

2008-06-30T06:12:00.000-07:00

I've finished all work commitments here in Longchuan, and now I'm just getting ready to leave. I had the end-of-term party where I briefly played guitar and made a speech in Chinese. This was followed by the Captains of all the classes making thankyou speeches to me, and the only one who didn't begin with 虽然-'although' won a prize for best speech.

This was followed by traditionally aggressive Chinese party-games, and looting of the Western snacks I'd hauled back from Hong Kong.

I've never been one for missing people or places. Probably because I never think about the possibility of never seeing them again. But the highs of this experience will probably be impossible to recapture (which is no problem), because China's at a unique point in its history, which happens to coincide with the most important (and infuriating) time of the Students' lives.

Whereas William Blake said:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild-flower
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour

I feel as if I've lived eternity in the past (almost) 2 months, so somebody find me a wildflower.

2008-06-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

In Aldous Huxley's Those Barren Leaves Francis Chelifer invents a game to take the tedium out of office work. It brings, he boasts, all the thrills of the fairground - the big dipper, the roller-coaster - right to your desk. All you have to do is pause for a moment in your daily grind and ask yourself: Why am I doing this? What is it all for? Where will it end? Ask yourself these questions thoughtfully enough, and though firmly seated in your office chair, you will feel like the void has opened beneath you, and you are sliding faster and faster into nothingness.

Well, here goes. I'll begin, unsurpsisingly, with a quote from a writer. In his 1972 lecture, 'Philately and the Postman,' Alan Garner pronounced:

Creativity in teaching is not to turn a random block of individuals into musicians, painters, authors, because any of them who are going to be these things, will become them in spite of you, certainly not because of you.

Having asked myself Mr Chelifer's question. That is, why am I teaching, when most of the time I don't enjoy it, and sometimes I feel like taking anything just to get the hell out of it.
In the classroom, I've recently taken the strategy of trying to make them forget that I am there. Of course, there have been good and disastrous consequences. But an almost invariably successful tactic was:

to write short plays for the Students to read, enjoy and ultimately, to provide them with the raw materials to write their own. Teaching, like most jobs, is often unpleasent and frequently pointless. But, to use another symbol from Alan Garner's lecture:

Left alone, the child, in my experience, will climb into the astronaut's seat; but the teacher is too often yelling at him to come down and concentrate on the scrap iron.

The problem here with trying to give Students a leg-up into the astronaut's chair is that most of them are so fucking passive. And I'm no good at motivating people who aren't self-motivated. In fact, it goes against what I believe in to try to motivate people who aren't self-motivated, or allow some jumped-up blackboard scribbler to motivate me. So I intend to be out of the teaching game forever within a year. Not that I berate teaching or the people who do it - but it would go against who I am to try to make a career of it.

torrents of muddy water bore down on the ruins of the town

2008-06-10T20:55:00.000-07:00

One of the worst affected areas by the quake was http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/goodbye-beichuan-lake-created-by-quake-destroys-chinese-town-844159.html
Here is the first paragraph of an article in the Independent:

Earthquake-battered Beichuan suffered its final indignity yesterday as torrents of muddy water bore down on the ruins of the town. The living have left, but the gushing waters took with them the corpses buried in the rubble; the life savings of the residents who were forced to leave; and official documents, books, letters and photographs that make up a person's memories.

John Carey pointed out that whereas John Keats and Percy Shelley were pre-Darwinian and pre-Freudian poets. Seamus Heaney is one of the most significant post-Freudian and post-Darwinian poets. Whereas in Keats's and Shelley's time, the truth was to be found in looking up to the sky, at skylarks and nightingales. Human thought at that time saw salvation and mystery in the heavens.

But most of Seamus Heaney's work delves into the muck beneath his feet. He writes about stuff that is to him, very commonplace, but to most people digging, butter-churning, and slaughtering animals with bare-hands, are symbols of a bygone and more honest existence.

Heaney explores the miracle of how we all came from the muck, and vividly touches on how destiny might be to get submerged in the muck of ones one making.

Which might also explain why there is some pathology behind my fondness for swimming in dirty rivers.

2008-06-02T19:35:00.000-07:00

I only realised in the middle of class the other night that it's National Children's Day. During the break I ran across to the shop to buy pop and sweets with which to play party games (for 17 year-olds) with the remainder of the lesson (and to preserve my lesson plan).

Last year, Children's Day fell shortly after the Principal of my School died. The behaviour of some Students that night led me to believe that I would never be able to control a class, and some classes would never be controlled.

The other night, as always, I was anxious and fired-up in the build up to lessons. Then, just before going into the classroom, one of the more advanced and confident Students asked me onto the balcony of my office to say, in halting English, that her and her classmates were very sad that I would be leaving soon.

It's particularly gratifying in China to be liked and wanted for who are and what you've done, rather than what you represent to people. So on that sentiment, I'll sign off with the ever tangential WB Yeats:

When You Are Old

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Dreams...

2008-05-24T23:44:00.000-07:00

tear them at the seams,
when a river becomes a thousand streams

It's unusual to meet a young Chinese person who doesn't dream of travelling abroad. Many of them have very vivid ideas of where they want to go. Last night, I went to my colleagues house to join her family for a meal (my first taste of homecooking here in Longchuan, and so far the only meal I've finished). The young members of the family all knew which country they wanted to go to, and I had to break the news to them that the world outside of China has more than one language (I subsequently taught bonjour, ola and Guten Tag).

On the way home, I stopped in an Internet Bar. I quickly get bored of polite company, and find that cretins shouting "hello" and kids watching you type as if its a spectator sport is a small price to pay for the authenticity of Internet Bars. I simultaneously held several conversations on the Chinese-language equivalent of MSN: QQ.

In one of the conversations, I faced the eventuality of telling a 20 year-old Student that I couldn't become her boyfriend, and although it was very brave of her to ask, it would be a bad idea from her point of view.

The contrast between people who yell across the street at foreigners, or treat us as objects with which to impress their friends, and those who have the courage and dignity to interact with us is always unmistakeable.

I asked her why she was so enamoured with somebody she barely knew just because I'm foreign. She said (implied) that her dream was to travel abroad, and unable to actively use English to interact, she could never make that come true unless she found a foreigner to do it for her.

I teach at two Middle-Schools, where most of the Students are between 16 and 20 and the Schools are on either side of the proverbial tracks. The girl in question is fro the wrong side. It seems to be a Universal problem, convincing people that go to lesser institutions that they're not stupid, and they- fuelled by the kind of self-reliance and self-belief that they don't teach at school - can contribute as much of value to the world as anybody else.

Last week, I spent a horrible four days in Hong Kong whilst trying to renew my Visa. During the day, the only helpful strangers I met were the Indian guys who sell things on the Street. They stand there, from early in the morning, until late at night, regardless of the weather, never letting their standard of courtesy slip.

The human touch can often be missing when interacting with people in China, and it can be found where you least expect it.

This post doesn't really have a point. It's just that I'm building up a hearty admiration for one type of person - those who take their ambitions into their own hands and don't let reasons become excuses. And a distaste for another - those cold and timid souls who can only greet strangers from across the street.

That might be a very trite way to conclude, but if it's true then it's only half a cliche

2008-05-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

After queuing for an hour at Huizhou train station on Monday, the only available seats in the waiting area were next to a chain-smoker or a screaming child, so I sat down two seats away from a woman in her early forties who looked lower-middle class. The seat was falling apart so she lifted her bag and let me sit next to her.

She saw me glancing at a flier that was lying on the seat and asked me if I could read Chinese. We proceeded to talk for another 45 minutes about the usual subjects: cultural differences, exchange rates and how the Chinese are perceived abroad. Other questions were conspicuous by their absence: how much money do you earn in a month? Do you have a girlfriend? How much do you weigh?

When we got up to walk to the platform I noticed a logo on her bag. It was for a well-known company whose name begins with Am and ends in Way.
After asking a kid to stand up so that we could sit together on the train, we chatted for another couple of hours. And then she asked me about money, and invited me back to Huizhou to look at her office, and offered to introduce me to her daughter.

She was definitely the sort of person I would like to keep contact with, but there's always a limit to how much of a rapport one can form with somebody when the desire (or the need) to sell them something, stands in the way.

Dancing About Architecture

2008-05-08T21:28:00.000-07:00

I tend to agree with Frank Zappa, that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. They are two disparate forms that should respect each others' privacy.

But I've been without it for over a week now (apart from my own guitar-playing of course), and daydreaming about it is starting to prove inadequate. In the last couple of months in Huizhou, at some point of every working day, I listened to Debussy, particularly a piano and violin piece that I didn't bother to learn the name of.

But without anyway to play my CD collection I will go mad soon, or at best, just lose all focus.

I don't know of anybody who put it better than Abba "without a song or a dance what are we" and I'm not into dancing which makes it doubly important.

Poets

2008-05-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

This is another paragraph from Llosa's The Way to Paradise that I had to get down before it was lost:

What could one expect of poets, even if they were workers, too? They were simply monsters of egotism, blind and deaf to the fortunes of their fellows, narcissists mesmerised by the sufferings they invented only in order to immortalise them in verse.

Last night, when I couldn't sleep, I lay up, as well as reading a couple of chapters of that novel, I practised my guitar (with a view to finally adding to those Youtube videos), made an entry into my Chinese-language diary, made another abortive attempt at creative writing, but all can be described as an attempt to invent emotions only in order to immortalise them.

By the way, if you read this Betty. I can't reply to your comment because I can't see my own or your blog. If you drop me an e-mail at mcgeary.gmail.com or add another comment with your own e-mail address, then we can have some guanxi.

Joining the Dots

2008-05-07T23:31:00.000-07:00

It's a year to the day now that I started working in China. I won't go into tales of nostalgia, reflection, or soliloquies on all the things I know now that I didn't know then.

But, shamefully, since coming to China, I have done nothing to update my website, and made no sustained attempt to continue my writing career (unless learning Chinese can be counted).

But, when I am at home (very briefly) in August and before then (if I have time) I can start a blog in Chinese and attach it directly to the website. Maybe even start up a Chinese-language version of the website. That's not to say my musings on Chinese history and traditional culture and what remains of both can provide natives with any insight they haven't heard before, (let alone the lives of the ordinary people here) but big things have small beginnings, and I have to get out of this habit of not writing creatively fast. It will also strengthen my eventual application for a PhD in Creative Writing, if I can claim to have learnt a foreign language to the point of being intelligently playful with it.

I'm posting this publicly in order to put pressure on myself to see it through.

Otherwise, my daily life is (almost literally) a world apart from what it was two weeks ago. There are no bars, no shops that sell anything other than daily necessities, no other foreigner, only one Chinese person (apart from the Students) who is conversant in English, and certainly no Western food.

Also, the first two nights my bed didn't have a mattress, and my room didn't have any mosquito protection so I went almost completely without sleep. And after a year, I'm only starting to get an uncensored glimpse of the breathtaking inefficiency and the cut and paste approach to professionalism that many foreigners associate with China.

Teaching all of these new students has been tough so far, but it is slowly getting better. And despite the peculiarity of the local accent, the language barrier is smaller than I had expected, and the people I see every day really respect my preference for being openly approached instead of shouted at from a distance.

I'll leave you with this, paraphrased from Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Way to Paradise":

(Paul Gaugin) agreed with his grandmother that one's birthplace was an accident of fate and finding the place in the world where one belongs is the adventure and a journey that make life worth livng.

Well I have days in China, and especially here in Longchuan when I feel very far from home, but knowing these people and learning this language is giving me reason to persist, and I've barely started to learn the things in the Chinese language that I most wish to know.

Towards Strangers

2008-05-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

A lot of people live their lives by Blanche Dubois's parting words

"Thankyou, whoever you are. I've always depended on the kindness of strangers."

I myself put that into practise when I was in America almost three years ago. Back then, I wasn't in a position of power. Some people (albeit a minority) dealt with me in ways that lacked humility, grace and generosity, and I never once thought that I might become such a person.

Earlier this week, after arriving in Shenzhen bus-station, and being one of the few people there who knew where I was going and how to get there, I didn't want to be accosted or (even temporarily) impeded.

There are guys in most of these big stations who don't wear uniforms or carry ID but seek to assist members of the public by carrying their luggage and leading them to the bus they want to get to.

Just after arriving in Shenzhen I was approached by such a person who, before I passed him started saying "sir sir bus bus." I responded in Chinese "我不要坐车" (I don't want to take a bus) which isn't in the slightest bit impolite. But after this bear of a man persisted in his soft, effeminate voice I ended up saying the same thing louder and quickening my pace. When I turned around to look at him, he had a shocked look of hurt and rejection but I had to speed away to avoid the big crush.

A week before that, I had an experience that anybody of non-Asian appearance who's been to Mainland China will be familiar with. On my own, walking from somewhere to somewhere late at night, I walk past a group of young guys, I look at them, they look at me, and as we're about to pass each others' line of vision the "helloooo" comes, no less spine-tingling for its inevitability. Of course, I don't want to do the parrot thing and make the peanut-brain who said it look big in front of his friends so I turn my head away and walk past, he then starts to mutter about me so I, in a charged but not necessarily antagonistic mood stop, turn around and say "你是什么东西？＂　which translates as 'what thing are you'? but its connotations are much worse. His friends started laughing at him, but when nobody came forth to confront me I turned around and walked to the pub.

Although I don't know their names, and never expect to see either of my recent victims again, I have (I think) made up for both incidents in other ways. But still, there are more important things to be than a polite stranger.

PS. If you're wondering why having a stranger say 'hello' to you might be construed as mockery or psychological warfare then come to China, or other particular places in the far-East.

Back to Blogging

2008-04-20T19:16:00.000-07:00

I've been in China for almost a year now and as with anywhere, there are interesting things, desirable things, irritating things and mysterious things, but the past year has mostly been unbloggable.

This might well change very soon though. I'm going (for three months) to work in a Middle School on the outskirts of Heyuan, a 2h30min train ride to the North.

There, the experience of Chinese culture will be far closer to grassroots level for several reasons:

1. It's a boarding school and I'll be living on campus.
2. I have reason to believe that I'll be the only foreigner living in the district.
3. It's a public school so I won't exclusively be teaching rich kids
4. There isn't a line of protection between me and the real opinions of the kids/parents, and nights out with the parents will be part of the deal.
5. The places I go for brief sanctuary (mainly Hong Kong) will be too far away for brief visits.

They are also reasons why I might be more compelled to blog over the coming months

Some things I didn't know about writing when I was monolingual

2008-02-12T21:57:00.000-08:00

That's not to say that I can assert that I 'speak Chinese' or that I can walk into a Chinese bookshop with any justifiable confidence, but I've already learnt a lot about our own language and what it is to be literate:

1. You can never fully grasp the implications of your use of language
As with any language, Chinese has different ways of saying the same things, but how and why the different ways evolved are always mysterious. If you think 'must, have to, got to, gotta, need to' have the same meaning - look closer.

2. Less is more
Any fool can talk at length, it takes skill to put a point across concisely, eg. to somebody who is new to the language you are speaking.

3.Language doesn't sit still
Mandarin was imposed very recently, it was meant to be unifying and accessible to all the people's of China, but the regional (and seemingly generational) variety in syntax, pronunciation and use of grammar makes me want to curl up in a ball when thinking about reaching fluency.

4. Language is a master, not a servant
Learning a language (including your own) is a process in which there are few controllables. Go with it, be playful, be played with: surrender.

5. Language acquisition is worth doing for its own sake
When I say for its own sake, I mean to say that different uses and justifications for taking the time and effort, emerge along the way. As a writer, your own language becomes more understandable and more mysterious.

6. You're always part of something bigger than yourself
In attempting to make your name as a writer, it helps to have a particular self-importance. You must have the conviction that the contents of your head are interesting, but you're only tool to express the contents of your head is language. The language was there long before you and will be there long after you. And your individual contribution can only ever be a fraction of why its great.

Why I Don't Write

2008-01-01T01:15:00.000-08:00

In 'Six Memos for the Next Millenium,' Italo Calvino articulates a lot of the reasons why I haven't felt like writing creatively (not in English anyway) or creatively in the past (at least) half year:

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if pets and writers set themselves tasks that noone else dares imagine wil literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various "codes" into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

With teaching, working with kids, and living in a foreign country, it's difficult to achieve a breadth of vision (especially in working with kids), and to liberate the imagination, what with all the daily annoyances: parents who spoil their kids, frequent cat-calls on the street, a mind-bogglingly unnecessary amount of noise, this seems like a time to live intensely and will hopefully precede a period of writing intensively.

This quote from Raymond Queneau provides an excellent excuse for not wanting to blog recently:

Another very wrong idea that is also doing the rounds at the moment is the equivalence that has been established between inspiration, exploration of the subconscious and liberation, between chance automtism and freedom. Now this sort of inspiration, which consists in blindly obeying every impulse, is in fact slavery. The classical author who wrote his tragedy observing a certain number of known rules is freer than the poet who writes down whatever comes to his head and is slave to other rules of which he knows nothing.

from Herman Hesse's 'The Glass Bead Game'

2007-09-23T21:40:00.000-07:00

"Doesn't the history of thought, of culture and the arts, have some kind of connection with the rest of history?"

"Absolutely not," his friend exclaimed."That is exactly what I am denying. World history is a race with time, a scramble for profit, for power, for treasures. What counts is who has the strength, luck or vulgarity not to miss his opportunity. The achievements of thought, of culture, of art, are just the opposite. They are always an escape from the serfdom of time, man crawling out of the muck of his instincts and out of his sluggishness, and climbing to a higher plane, to timelessness, liberation from time, divinity. They are utterly unhistorical and antihistorical."

Active Life Versus Contemplative Life

2007-09-18T00:29:00.000-07:00

Since coming to China on May 4th:

Active
Swam in the South China Sea. Hunted for flammable materials in the dark and the following morning, walked the length of the beach and back several times.

Contemplative
Probably averaged 2 hours a day of Chinese-language study, I'm now transposing the book I used to learn conversational Chinese from pinyin into characters.

Active
Got up at 8 am to meet somebody by the Li Jiang River where it's at its deepest. Tried to catch fish with my bare hands and dived in several times as my companion sat and watched. I did drop my watch in there but managed to David Hasselhoff it out of the riverbed.

Contemplative
Wondered about the hypocrisy and indifference of institutional education, yet decided that the real reason why I won't end up a part of it is because I'm ot sufficiently fond of kids.

At the moment I'm reading Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game , which is largely about the artificiality of such distinctions. Anyway, I've seen base animal instinctiveness and life-affirming insight in the most unexpected places.

In other news:

I got very drunk on National Teacher's Day. An entire evening of gan bei-ing and then several whiskeys just about did for me.

I've been promising it for a while, but I've made a big step towards making more music videos by finally buying a laptop.

The school has resumed Chinese lessons after a month and a half without. I have been placed in the advanced group (actually I just placed myself there) and my teacher is also my teaching buddy who sits in the classroom while I'm teaching and intervenes whenever necessary.

RIP Tony Wilson

2007-08-11T03:32:00.000-07:00

hopefully I'll be able to form a longer post on why Tony Wilson and his contribution to Madchester matter to me.

2007-07-29T22:03:00.000-07:00

In "The Town I Loved So Well," Phil Coulter sings:

and when times got rough,
there was just about enough,
and we saw it through without complaining" .

In recent weeks I've met plenty of people who see it through without complaining. I've been teaching kids a language spoken in countries that few will ever visit, helping them to a certificate in one of the world's least meritocratic societies.

Throughout my formal education, I was taught that cliches are a bad thing, but it's only meeting people who are incapable of defying cliche on any level that I have begun to understand the importance.

The cliche of hard-work being the only key and cause that success has is the particularly grating one at the moment.

I can't sum up the time I've had since my last post briefly, but one thing this (until recently, peasent) society has to its advantage is that people are aware that hard-work is just a fact of existence and doesn't guarantee or entitle one to anything.

This is by no means a perfect place to be, I ordered a milk-tea three times this morning, the first time it came with beans in it, the second time with a cocktail stick and a cherry and the third time with ice. And the etiquette is simply abysmal, more than can be corrected in the one year before the Olympics, but knowing how little there is for me in the UK, I haven't once itched to be home.

2007-06-25T20:02:00.000-07:00

I'm not neglecting this blog. It just takes time to formulate a response to everything that's happening here.

Also, I'm working on learning the language which takes a lot of time but I don't really consider it work.

2007-05-30T23:25:00.000-07:00

Robert McKee wrote in Story, , some people believe that there is a direct correlation between happy endings and success at the box office, but more importantly it has to be truthful. Some people don't go to see films that face up to truths about bad things because they associate movies with leisure time, but if you take a look at those people's lives, they probably avoid dark thoughts in general, and never feel emotions with any real intensity.

At my place of work, in a country where death is never talked about without the utmost sobriety, there has been no avoiding it over the past ten days. So firstly, I would like to post Simon Armitage's poem about 'life' and how some people experience those intensities where they're least expect them:

It ain't what you do, it's what it does to you.

I have not bummed across America
with only a dollar to spare, one pair
of busted Levi’s and a bowie knife.
I have lived with thieves in Manchester.

I have not padded through the Taj Mahal,
barefoot, listening to the space between
each footfall, picking up and putting down
its print against the marble floor. But I

skimmed flat stones across Black Moss on a day
so still I could hear each set of ripples
as they crossed. I felt each stone’s inertia
spend itself against the water; then sink.

I have not toyed with a parachute cord
while perched on the lip of a light aircraft;
but I held the wobbly head of a boy
at the day centre, and stroked his fat hands.

And I guess that the lightness in the throat
and the tiny cascading sensation
somewhere inside us are both part of that
sense of something else. That feeling, I mean.

and attending a Taoist funeral reminded me of a Hymn I have no recollection of not knowing. It's probably because the temple was between four mountains through which a river ran and was truly isolated:

I, the Lord of sea and sky,
I have heard my people cry.
All who dwell in dark and sin,
My hand will save.

Chorus
Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night.
I will go, Lord, if you lead me.
I will hold your people in my heart.

I, who made the stars of night,
I will make their darkness bright.
Who will bear my light to them?
Whom shall I send?

Chorus
Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night.
I will go, Lord, if you lead me.
I will hold your people in my heart.

I, the Lord of snow and rain,
I have borne my people’s pain.
I have wept for love of them.
They turn away.

Chorus
Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night.
I will go, Lord, if you lead me.
I will hold your people in my heart.

I will break their hearts of stone,
Give them hearts for love alone.
I will speak my words to them.
Whom shall I send?

Chorus
Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night.
I will go, Lord, if you lead me.
I will hold your people in my heart.

I, the Lord of wind and flame,
I will send the poor and lame.
I will set a feast for them.
My hand will save.

Chorus
Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night.
I will go, Lord, if you lead me.
I will hold your people in my heart.

Finest bread I will provide,
'Til their hearts be satisfied.
I will give my life to them.
Whom shall I send?

Chorus
Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night.
I will go, Lord, if you lead me.
I will hold your people in my heart.

Piqnique a la plage

2007-05-15T19:09:00.000-07:00

Monday was my weekly day off.
On sunday evening after work, eleven of us set off by bus to the South China Sea. It was 90 minutes away and (I think) quite close to the border with Vietnam.

The beach was dark hen we arrived, but after we'd pitched our tents we managed to get the nearby restaurant to reopen. We ordered our dinner while it was still swimming or nestling at the bottom of the tank.

Before going to bed we managed to steal enough wood and dead greenery (and some discarded clothing) to get a fire going. It was like getting back to my primitive side, in rythm with the earth with a lighter and a can of Nivea for Men.

I didn't want to ast any of my beach time by going to sleep.

On monday I managed to alk the length of the beach and back three times, having some of the locals asking to have their photo with me along the way.

Swimming in the South China Sea is electrifying. The phosphorescence is like nothing I've ever experienced, and in parts, the warmth wouldn't disgrace a bathtub.

We also managed to whoop some Chinese lads in football six a side.

Altogether, the beach camping trip as worth the sunburn and the mozzie bites.

The Orange-Drink Lemon-Drink Man

2007-04-22T04:53:00.000-07:00

In Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Rahel suggests that Ammu marry the villainous but outwardly charming drinks vendor. Instead of getting angry with her, Ammu explains that she is just going to love her less for the rest of their lives.

I've been wondering (mostly in solitude) whether it is just paranoia and propaganda to say that a decline in articulacy and a stifling of communicability have changed our society. For me, there have always been Priests who reduce inexpressible feelings to stale sentimentalities; barroom philosophers who preach all the more agressively because they know how clueless they are; people engaging in "banter" that's a transparent attempt to destroy each another's self-worth (the give away is that it isn't funny).

Since I've been out of academia, I've accepted that time spent enriching and time spent socialising are mostly seperate.

Last night I walked through some woods that I'd only half dicvovered before. I got to the point where I'd always thought there was a dead-end, but it split into two paths. There was a flat surface that I ha to throw a stone into to figure out it was a pond, plus I love the sound of footsteps on wood over water. Eventually, the path led onto a road that was closed late last year because of an inevitable fatality.

I took my shoes and socks off and felt the soil, bark and shrubs between my toes, remembering why we evolved toes. Running beside this path are new flats and houses and appartment, so despite the almost complete lack of a moon there were few shadows to dive into if anybody caught me and thought me mad. But nobody was around.

I'm glad I don't have to crave human contact too often.

More Alastair McIntosh

2007-04-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

In his Chapter, 'The Womanhood of God', Alastair McIntosh argues that post-Reformation theology in these islands has been necrophilic: obsessed with death, and what would happen thereafter. It hasn't been about seeing death as reuniting us with the soft soil from which new life can grow, but has been the outcome of fear-driven, victim-blaming, dominator-wins history. This is 'a politically constructed churchianity rather than the spiritual dynamics of cosmic love that Jesus actually taught.'

12 pages later, he quotes Sophia in Proverbs 8 (philosophy: philo - sophia means "lover of the Godess of wisdom").

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth -
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world's first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens,
I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him like a master worker
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
And now, my children, listen to me:
happy are those who keep my ways.
Hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it.
Happy is the one who listens to me,
waching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors.
For whoever finds me finds life
and obtains favour from the Lord;
but those who miss me injure themselves;
all who hate me love death.

McIntosh himself said that some of the sentiments expressed in his books would be dismissed by Christians as too Pagan, and dismissed by Pagans as too Christian. But when we celebtrate things, whether our religion, culture or anything else, we often underestimate its unexceptionality. The similarity, and possible universality, is illustrated by the poem that Robert Graves asserted should be the beginning of the study of Englsih Literature, The Song of Amergin. According to legend, it was recited by the Milesians as they first landed in Ireland from Spain to defeat the Tuatha de Danaan and banish them to the world of the invisible (think the line from the Corinthians that's quoted in
Pilgrim's Progress, "that which is seen is temporal, that which is unseen is eternal"). For the second time in the history of this blog, I'll quote the text of the Song of Amergin (there are several translations, this comes from Chet Raymo's essay The Music of What Happens.

I am the wind on the sea.
I am the ocean wave.
I am the sound of the billows.
I am the seven-horned stag.
I am the hawk on the cliff.
I am the dewdrop in sunlight.
I am the fairest of flowers.
I am the raging boar.
I am the salmon in the deep pool.
I am the lake on the plain.
I am the meaning of the poem.
I am the point of the spear.
I am the god that makes fire in the head.
Who levels the mountain?
Who speaks the age of the moon?
Who has been where the sun sleeps?
Who, if not I?

I am the god that makes fire in the head.

2007-04-18T04:58:00.000-07:00

It's a cloudless mid-May Sunday afternoon in 2004. Two boys, all biceps, and two girls, all chest, are watching their two housemates have a casual kickabout.
Without warning, one of them smashes the ball as hard as he humanly can. It lands inches away from the glass wall of the nearest pub and bounces to safety. As the giels recover from the shock, the boys offer their amused assessment of what they've just witnessed:

"No go" repeated in a caricatured Northern accent.
"That was like the John Smith's advert: 'ave it!"
"It was like something off Jackass."
"It was like a Roy Keane pile-driver."

It would be absurd to compare such a harmless incident to Monday's shootings in Virgina. However, having skimmed through James Delingpole's How to be Right in Waterstones yesterday, I've been thinking about some of the issues he brings up: liberalism, egalitarianism, indiscipline, the youth of today. I thought an incident that involved staggering inarticulacy, complacency, callousness, and indifference that can all be partly blamed on the forces in question, was a good place to start.

Instead of being a guide, as the title suggests, it is actually an A-Z, not unlike a disproportionately politicised riposte to the decidedly leftist Is It Just Me or is Everything Shit? It rants about many predictable things: pro-Eurpoean and pro-Palestinian bias at the BBC; Britain becoming the world's endearingly dippy rich uncle over the Make Poverty History campaign; and a supposedly limp-wristed egalitarianism that has allowed Polytechnics to call themselves Universities without raising their standards.

The book is, unsurprisingly mean-spirited and distortive. But just as the third point is lent some credence by the afore-mentioned incident, it begs questions. If the Right has such a love affair with Free-Trade that unashamedly swallows everything, why is it the left that perverts tradition? Hasn't the undermining of education at least partly been down to the valuelessness of the Free Market? Hasn't the Market been responsible for the decline of traditional pillars of the curriculum like Classics, Latin and Greek and the rise of less 'academic' courses like Media Studies and Sociology? The main point against the BBC seems to be a lack of patriotism in war-time, but don't you just have to view Fox News to see how self-proclaimed patriots make poor journalists?

The most interesting subject to discuss though is Britain's perceived over-generosity. In The Myths We Live By, Mary Midgely argues that Enlightenment ideas of human rights and the social contract are horribly outdated. It made sense at the time that human-tights were the result of mutual obligation, yet this moral tradition has no place in a less manageable, globalised world. Our behaviour impacts far away people in ways that were until recently, impossible.

I'm interested in exploring the links, economic, spiritual, social, between us and those who've experienced things we can't imagaine. And reading another example of the left and the right tossing insults at one another encourages me to look beyond mainstream commentary to find the answers.

The pleasure is in the digging (eg the summer I spent digging to Australia when I was 9), and it's failing to seek an answer that leads to the kind of impotence, confusion and rage described at the beginning of this entry. I should know, I've been there.

2007-04-13T14:29:00.000-07:00

This piece by Alastair McIntosh is an inspiration in light of last night's Channel 4 Drama The Mark of Cain . I think a lot about the Military with a mixture of distaste for Army Culture and guilt that I've never had to face hardships on the same scale: the pressures placed on soldiers and their families; the internal politics; what it must take to motivate oneself. The programme (although only a work of contentious drama)confirmed some of my worst preconceptions about the army and the people who make it up: mindlessly obedient, Machiavellian, politically motivated, and every character was either a moral coward or a bully.

My time in America taught me that some organizations are very good at convincing people that to disagree with their institutional values, is to be a weaker person. I think this is especially true of the military. I saw a picture in a Facebook group two days ago of General Tommy Franks with a speech bubble saying something like: "Next time you're home, and you see an anti-war protestor, shake his hand, and as you walk away, wink at his girlfriend because she knows she's dating a pussy." Then there is the cartoon that draws a scrawny crop-haired young man alongside a hulking, fully-kitted soldier. The young man has PEACE written on his t-shirt and the flower in his hand is drooping because of the stink lines coming off him. The soldier is carrying a little, dark-skinned girl (presumably away from danger) and the caption reads "Who has done more for world peace"?

Here are two of my favourite extracts from McIntosh's essay. These should lend insight into why he's such an inspiration.

"Violence, it is true, only understands violence, and it gets confused and has to think twice when faced with the opposite."

"If violence is the absence of love, nonviolence is about the presence of relationship. It is the means of connection with that which gives life.

That is why it's hard to explain in prosaic language why nonviolence matters and from where it derives its power. It's why many of those who argue for peace have difficulty in completing their arguments. The argument starts in this world, but doesn't end there. The suffering that we voluntarily take on is a birth pang, and you have to trust to life beyond life to get to full delivery. You have to remember that the greater part of our being can never be killed, and that God is always on the side of the suffering."

2007-04-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

For somebody who didn't go to a 'proper' University to do my Undergrad, and didn't do a 'solid traditional' course for my MA, I feel alienated about most of the discourse that exists around Higher Education and the people who navigate the system. This has been compounded by three articles published in the Daily Telegraph over the last two days: one by Boris Johnson on Grade Inflation; one by Bryony Gordon on a generation of young men; and this morning's article by Jeff Randall on the cheapening of degrees

Certain things never get mentioned: a chosen course should be the subject that one finds most interesting and stimulating, not most difficult; many young people are imaginative, innovative and irrepressible, exams are always stressful, but to be able to sit in a library and study all day is, to some, a pleasure and a privilege; most so-called "serious" courses of what many Conservatives believe to be the Golden-Age of education (the 50s to the 70s) are more impractical for industry than much-maligned courses like Media Studies and Sociology.

Here is an article from The Times that I cut out 2 days before A-Level results day 2004. It was a time when I was absorbed in my studies and other disciplines but knowing that a hard rain was gonna fall.

The Times Tuesday August 17 2004

Good luck, kids. There’s a lot more to making the grade than A-Levels.
Libby Purves

It’s A-Level results week. Rituals will take place. Newspapers will carry pictures of girls in tight, strappy tops, shrieking attractively. Education pundits will chunter about grade inflation. Ministers will say that whatever happens just proves what a good job the Government is doing.

Meanwhile, university admissions officers will sweat over figures praying that they were not so over-generous with offers that they end up with insufficient tutors or accommodation. In families where someone didn’t make their grades, determined parents will stand over sons and daughters while they phone the faculty in quavering voices to beg for clemency. There will be a political row about private schools.

And, most dispiriting of all, there will be a rush for “clearing”. This is a grim business whereby universities – desperate to get bums on seats – publish lists of vacancies, and students with bruised egos calculate whether Business with American film at Grubthorpe will prove an adequate replacement for Modern American History at Rummidge. Actually, it might. But it might not: and such decisions are over-hasty. You are 18 and terrified at being left out of the loop and not at “uni” like your mates, so you plunge. One in six of you then drops out, in debt and still without a degree.

By and large, it ought to be a hopeful week, a mass launching of keen teenagers into the first phase of adult life. Sadly, it often isn’t. There is unease in the air, born of the widespread questioning of exam standards, university admissions and degrees themselves. There is also healthy, but depressing, scepticism about the Government’s unsupported conviction that however much you expand Higher Education, a degree will confer higher earnings. In the name of this belief it insouciantly throws young people into enormous debt, and some cases endorses three years of drifting and dissipated idleness.

Moreover, hanging over even the happiest students is the uncomfortable knowledge that, on present trends, some eight million will be back home in three years’ time, living with weary parents and applying for even duller jobs.

It is not education politics I want to focus on, but something more primitive and individual. If the difficulties and decisions of this week make anything plain, it is the need for those setting out in life to have the best sort of confidence. This does not mean the insanely high self-esteem, all too familiar to employers, in which children are so overpraised that they come to believe that the world owes them a fabulous job just because they passed some exams. I mean a realistic confidence: self-knowledge, balance, a quiet awareness of what natural talents you have and how much you need to refine them.

It means intelligent observation of the real world – not the TV screen – and respect for the experience of your elders. It means a willingness to go on learning. It means being steady enough in your own emotional life, even during interludes of broken-heartedness, to endure slights at work without internalising them and wailing that you are a failure.

Real confidence means – well, just about the whole of Kipling’s If, really. It’s a lot to as. But you do see it from time to time, and its owners are blessed. They will not collapse in tears over their A-level results, or sign up for some pointless course and spend the next three years lying in till noon, alternately despising themselves and fantasising about being discovered by Steven Spielberg. They will stand aside, think carefully, then take their own path.

How can we grow such realistically confident people, willing to step away from the lemming mainstream, and trust both themselves and life? When I look around at the way we manage children from birth onwards, it seems to me that almost every trend makes us less likely to produce such steady beings. We have our babies in an atmosphere of febrile anxiety over everything from IVF to MMR; then we bombard them with material goods but with ever less parental time.

We send them, increasingly in their earliest infancy, into day nurseries whose basic flaw is demonstrated in that horrible BBC undercover film last week. It showed that where you have low-paid, low-status, pig-stupid employees, who don’t love your children, they will treat them badly. There have been various defences attempted – claims that the filming was unrepresentative, that hygiene flaws were no worse than many homes and that many mothers shout. But the sound of those girls’ loveless, contemptuous barking at confused babies was so real and frightening that even our dog got seriously upset, and came to sit shivering next to my chair for the whole programme.

What are these infants learning? That you must conform, sit on the correct mat, eat and sleep at the correct time, and never express your fear or loneliness.

Then we send them to school. Where we repeatedly test them on a rigid curriculum; this has its advantages, but conducted in large class groups it means that teachers are hampered in their instinct to respond with joyful humanity to children’s individual curiosity. Lessons are “delivered”, increasingly often by untrained classroom assistants, so there is less scope for questioning than there should be. Yet it is permission and time to question which best breeds confidence.

We lightly cause them grief by divorcing; yet at the same time we are so terrified for their physical safety that we barely trust them to go out alone, certainly not to converse with interesting strangers. Trash TV and aggressive computer games are their companions. Small wonder if fantasy grips adolescents as the family erodes. I sometimes think that the best hope for the next generation is that this lot watch The Simpsons: they at least do family life con brio and con amore.

As they grow older, we do allow them out, there to be exploited by cynical pop and fashion industries. We kowtow to an ersatz teen “culture” which is heavily sexualised. Many, in consequence, have full sex too early, assisted by sex educators handing out condoms and morning-after pills; again there is damage to developing confidence. You might think that such affair would be a maturing experience, and maybe where true love is concerned, they sometimes are. But social research proves that boys do it to prove they aren’t gay, and girls do it because the boys put pressure on. The result is that before the age of 18many children have suffered at least one full scale sexual betrayal, given themselves totally and then been dumped and traduced as a bad lay. This emotional battering may harden them outwardly, but I do not think it builds the kind of realistic, relaxed confidence which carries you happily through the transition from to adult life.

These are social trends; of course there are exceptions. There are happy, preoccupied geeks, swots, bookworms, nerds, Goths and hippies; there are children whose upbringing has been steady – or eccentric – enough to make them immune to the cruelties of fashion. There are adolescents lucky enough to have adult mentors who help them to real satisfying mastery – whether of a guitar or of a boat or a charity fundraising effort or a poetic form. There are young people who would please Kipling: who fill the unforgiving minute, trust themselves, can dream without making dreams their master, handle disasters and keep their heads – even about A-level results – when all around are losing theirs.

Of course there are. May they flourish. All I am saying is that an awful lot of verifiable social trends militate against the rising generation turning out that way. Our culture reflected in our media, is nervous, materialistic, petulant, self-indulgent, emotionally incontinent, ignorant of its roots and morbidly obsessed with appearances.

To emerge from it calm, graceful, generous, modest and hardworking is quite an achievement. More than any A grades. Good luck, kids: it’s you that count, not the label.

My attempts at writing fiction as an undergrad....

2007-04-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

the first drafted piece I handed in of my dissertation had a response consisting of five words(and five punctuation marks) at the bottom:
Plot? Psychological insight? Social insight?

The characters were based on various Warringtonians (mostly bar-room philosophers) and teachers I'd had in my life. They tended to involve imagined relationships between people from entirely different compartments of my life.

I had to go back almost a year to a response to a novel I'd begun to find the key as to how to turn things around. I must have written 2000 words (of 6000) in one sitting, and in the middle of this was a paragraph that wasn't revised or particularly thought about, was highly elliptic but was apparently bursting with yearning and pathos.

Then, a short story called Drizzle was my first wholly successful piece in writing about vacuousness and banality in a way that wasn't vacuous and banal. It had three main characters, an alcoholic, living in his brother's house in Suburbia and struggling to find inspiration for his poetry; a young piano teacher, teaching the daughter of the man who was her favourite school teacher, and an eleven year-old boy playing football on his own, and what's going on in their, in various ways, limited imaginations is infinitely more vivid than the outer world: the lazy canal that the ball nearly rolls into; the garage door that it thunders into; the Grade 1 piece that the girl is teaching.

In the two and a half years since I wrote 'Drizzle', I have gained immeasurable insight into this vacuousness. About eighteen months before I wrote it I was having a conversation in somebody's basement and after about half an hour of being there he started to giggle and tell me that a mutual acquaintance of ours had jumped off a bridge and died. I've learned since that, while this guy is an extreme example, he is a mere microcosm of an indifference and an arbitrary cruelty that is very common in the world.

In an atmosphere that generally resists scholarly thought, whose idea of 'making conversation' is actually the opposite of mutual communication, and resists imaginative activities that aren't passive, I feel as if I'm making progress.

The Marvellous Toy

2007-03-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

When I hear the word 'enough' a variety of things flash through my mind: Kurt Cobain groaning "Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be"; the (literally) rooms in my (parents') house that are clogged with disused possessions, most of which are in inadequate condition to sell; and, most vividly, a present I got when I was younger.

It's not like me to unremember the exact age I was at when a significant thing happened, but I might not be right when I say I was 8 when I received this. The toy I wanted most was something my neighbour had. It was a ring where we could place our Wrestling figures against one another, bought from Toys 'R' Us. It had ropes to bounce off, corner-posts to pounce off, and steps that one's opponent's head coud be smashed into repeatedly.

Instead of buying me one of my own, my dad went out to the garage, sawed out a board of plywood, about 12" x 8". He hammered four nails into the corners and wrapped two strings around the outsides, and the only finishing touch required from there was for me to write WWF in the centre.

Much of my reading, and therefore much of my writing, over the past two years has explored the possibility of a reacquaintance with our past, not as a form of conservatism, but a way of combating a Jungian neurosis and the modern ill of (Mc)meaninglessness. And parts of this are notions like 'digging where we stand' and exploring the concept of enough.

When I was nine, my brother and I spent the entire summer at my grandmas while our house in England was having an extension built. As a break from stacking turf at the bog and going to the cattle market, we dug a hole to Australia. Well, it was supposed to go to Australia, only we were digging sideways into a bank. It's where I met the term (and the concept) key-stone. It was a suggestion put across in Alistair McIntosh's Soil and Soul and will definitely play a part in my next book. It is a hyperbolic way of examining how the truth lies beneath our feet.

Anyway, that was an aside, I've already tried my hand at travelling salesmanship, and heard some disturbing accounts at what goes on in call-centres. I am diturbed at the lengths to which highly capable people, in super-rich countries sometimes go to to "pay their way", and wonder whether a gentler, more interdependent life is attainable.

This is a somewhat tangential post with no central message, but I'll leave you with the words of Bill Hicks , that are part commentary on our consumer-society and part identification of those who are to blame.

Well, somebody somewhere is fucked and there's little doubt we're all being fucked. I don't agree with Hicks but I find solace in the fact that he said it.

Why I Write

2007-02-06T07:34:00.000-08:00

This blog is suppposed to be a gaze into the blinkered mind of one who would write a book in a world of such a kind. A recent artice in the New Statesman gave me some reminder as to why. It is about how evangelism in America is to many, not just an irrational dogma or another form of nihilism. Chet Raymo, who has written extensively about the subject, drew the comparison with Ancient Greece.

In The Greeks and the Irrational ER Dodds points out that during the third century BC, Greece was the closest thing to an 'open' society the world would see until modern times. It was an economically accomplished society confident of its powers. Aristotle had urged his fellow citizens to recognize the divine spark within themselves. Zeno had asserted that God's true temple is the human intellect. Soon however, supernaturalism would return, and rationalists would be scapegoated:

As the intellectuals withdrew further into a world of their own, the popular mind was left defenseless...and left without guidance, a growing number relapsed with a sigh of relief into the pleasures and comforts of the primitive...better the rigid determinism of the astrological fate than the terrifying burden of daily responsibility

I've found enormous inspiration in Soil and Soul by the poet, human ecologist and activist Alistair McIntosh. He describes the Celtic bard who, like Thomas the Rhymer in The Faerie Queen has been granted, and must not betray, the 'tongue of truth.'

To the bard, historical truth is a psychological and spiritual reality rather than an absolute. He must help his people understand who they are, and that their lives are part of the deft weaving of history.

Bardism is an alternative to the irrational dogmatism that attempts to resist the bulldozing of history. As an (unintentional) explanation for Bardism, here's a long quote from Memories, Dreams and Reflections by CG Jung. For now I have nothing to add to this quote:

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity and primitivity as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the further it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motivation. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilisation and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promise of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.

I told myself I'd get serious about this blogging business. I can't promise I'll try, but I'll try to try in the near future.

Everywhen

2007-01-25T02:53:00.000-08:00

I was going to write an essay on the Physics of Time. This is what I came up with:

Is there a place where the shapes of our lives
make sense to a higher form of right and wrong?
There is one thing we all try to defy
as the clock never stops slugging on-
to the morning when the life-insurance cheque
comes padding down on the carpet
And the neighbours sit sighing and remembering back
Over sandwiches, tea and crumpet.

Is the past just a realm in the mirror of today?
Or buried like bones underground?
Is the future just a void where living things fade?
Or where the woman in a white silk gown
Shows the boy who ws buggered and strangled in the woods
The vinegar-soaked cloth that will cleanse all blood
As is, was and will be, and as grows the apple tree.

2007-01-05T01:34:00.000-08:00

In the first chapter of ´Story´by Robert McKee, he argues that story has replaced traditional ideologies as our main source of an answer to Aristotles´s question: "how should a man lead his life?"

Science, once the great explicator, garbles life with complexity and perplexity. Who can listen without cynicism to economists, sociologists, politicians? Religion, for many, has become an empty ritual that masks hypocrisy. As our source for traditional ideologies diminishes, we turn to the source we still believe in: story.

I´ve been considering the role of storytelling, its possibilities and its limitations. Everybody has a story to tell. It might be a story of love achieved or failed. It might be a story of confrontation faced or shrunken from. But whatever it was, it taught them about themselves and their societies. And whatver it is, different versions of many people have had a similar experience.Maybe the reason why so many people think that their lives are passing through history like a field-mouse, not leaving a trace, is not that they feel they have never had stories to tell, but they lacked an interested audience. This brings me onto the idea of ´myth´.

A myth is a story that in some sense, happened once, but is also happening all the time. It is of unknown origin, is never closed to thoughtful revision, and instead of a specific historical context, it tends to have taken place in the sacred time of everywhen. The reason why so many myths of the twentith century failed is that they were narrowly ideological (Leninism), ethnic (Nazism), dogmatic (Islamism) or selfish (neo-liberalism/consumerism).

According to Karen Armstrong, a successful myth is a story that all human beings can relate to their own lives. The perilous journey through the mines of Lascaux is comparable to the journey we all took out of the amniotic bliss of the womb and into this world. The myth of the Odyssey taken by Ulysses teaches us that to reach the end of our journey is to arrive at the beginning and know the place for the first time. CP Cavafy illustrated the evolution of this myth in his poem Íthaca´ stating that if you should find her bare (Ithaca) shall not have deceived you. You will be rich with everything you have gained on the journey itself.There are obvious differences between a novel and a myth. A novel has a known author. A novel is a commodity. Societies have survived without novels but never without myths. But in Á Short History of Myth´, Armstrong concludes that as religion, with other traditional ideologies, fails to do its job, it might be the task of novelists to bring fresh insight into our lost and damaged world.

As writer John Berger pointed out in the introduction to his Ínto Their Labours´trilogy, the most noble ideologies can dwarf death "Rivoluzione O La Morte", the most trivial can only ignore it "consumerism". In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin wrote:

For every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

Maybe this is the danger of allowing our stories to go untold. And maybe the novel, where the footprints of the present can fit into those of the past; where the dead can live alongside the living; where dreams can become manifest alongside the everyday; and the relationship between private lives and the great historical events that they coincide with, is more vivid than in ordinary modes of thought. Maybe that is how fresh insight canbe brought and death be dwarfed.

Climate Change & A Spiritual Revolution

2006-12-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

No less an icon than Kirk Douglas was reported in this morning's Guardian as calling upon my generation to take its future into its own hands. The most memorable paragraph is this one:

"Generation Y, you are on the cusp. You are the group facing many problems: abject poverty, global warming, genocide, Aids, and suicide bombers to name a few. These problems exist, and the world is silent. We have done very little to solve these problems. Now, we leave it to you. You have to fix it because the situation is intolerable."

Having just turned ninety he can be excused from saying this in the second person. But another senior citizen has pointed out that climate change is also brought about by small and complex changes in our orbitting of the sun. Alan Garner pointed out in his 2003 essay 'The Poetry That Lies Beneath Our Feet' that the last time the planet went through a similar change in climate, when the human population was much smaller, it is unlikely that it led to many people drowning:

Twelve and a half thousand years ago, the temperature rose by 7C, and the sea level by 400 feet, in 50 years. Yet it is unlikely that many human beings drowned as a direct result. People adapted and moved. The massive global warming led to agriculture, farming, the development of writing, the building of cities (that is, civilization), and ironically the freeing for occupation of a huge land mass that is now the main polluter and threat to our fragile and overloaded human ecology: America.

His mentioning of America reminds me of Karen Armstrong's insistence on our return to some of the values of the Axial Age (an age the philosopher Karl Jaspars categorised as happening between 800 and 200 BCE and comprising the lives of Socrates, Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Jeremiah, the Buddha, Confucius and Lao Tzu, Armstrong even tries to squeeze Jesus and Muhammad in). She insists that these values can make us realise that all human beings are as important as ourselves and lead us to venerate the earth as sacred rather than as an infinite resource. Without such a spiritual revolution we wil not save the planet.

Now, back to America. Today I rediscovered an article from the astroarchaeology website that pointed out the similarities between the Red Indians and the ancient Irish race of the Tuatha de Dannan. The whole thing is worth reading, but here is part of a speech by a Native American which is kind of an open addrss to the Great Chief in Washington:

Even the white man cannot be exempt from the common destiny. One thing we know, which the white man may one day discover – our god is the same god. You may think that you own him as you wish to own the land but you cannot. This Earth is precious to the great spirit, and to harm the Earth is to heap contempt on its creator. The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed, and one night you will suffocate in your own waste.

And down the side of the screen is the earliest known Irish poem. It comes not only from a pre-Christian society, but it was written before Christ lived and as well as having similarities to the fierce and omnipotent God of the Old Testament, it is a God who makes it clear that we are the ones who are fragile surrounded by the earth that he has created:

THE SONG OF AMERGIN

I am the wind on the ocean
I am the rolling wave
I am the murmur of the billows
I am the bull of seven battles
I am the falcon on the rock
I am the dewdrop in the Sun
I am the lovely flower
I am the wild boar
I am the salmon in the pool
I am the lake in the plain
I am the power of art
I am the point of a lance in battle
I am the God who creates the fire in the head.

Who casts the light
into the gathering on the mountain?
Who announces the ages of the moon?
Who points to the Sun?

2006-12-04T13:29:00.000-08:00

"Truth is never pretty, that is just mathematicians' sentimentality. And the pursuit of it does not make for pretty people. Truth can only be found in the cellars and sewers of the human mind."

Truth is something that anybody can claim to be telling: the BNP, Fox News, The Labour Party, the Socialist Worker Party. The reason why my post tonight is so short is that I've been busy writing an account of my experience as a door-to-door salesman in America. The prose is spare and the storytelling's extremely elliptic, but I've decided that that's the only way to be truthful about the experience.

In the room the women come and go, talking of Michaelangelo

2006-12-02T05:25:00.002-08:00

Ibsen made the distinction between those artists who went down to the sewers to bathe and those who went there to purify. In an article in this morning's Daily Telegraph, Michael Henderson associates Damien Hirst with a loose collection known as 'young British artists' in saying that Hirst has nothing to say but he's determined to say it.

When I did a module called 'Twentieth Century Fiction' in the final year of my BA, I was taught that one of the defining characteristics of post-modernism was a tendency to blur the distinction between high-culture (ie figures in the first half of the centure, Stravinsky, TS Eliot, Joyce, Picasso) and low (or popular culture). I now think that this is one of the positive things about post-modernism. All works of art are after all, packaged commodities like everything else. As Peter Carey writes in the last paragraph of his 300 worder 'Report on the Shadow Industry':

My own feelings about the shadows are ambivalent to say the least. For here I have manufactured one more: elusive, unsatisfactory, hinting at greater beauties and more profound mysteries that exist somewhere before the beginning and somewhere after the end.

This doesn't however, prevent many 'artists' from living in a bubble of self-importance. Fame fame fatal fame can play hideous tricks on the brain. In 1988 the critic DJ Taylor lamented how the English novel was being denigrated into 'Drawing-room twitter' and how the great issues of the day were being shunned.

One artist that cannot be accused of twittering is the rock band Radiohead. Noel Gallagher recently said in an interview with The Guardian that he had no use for or understanding of Radiohead. He had grown up with the charts and wanting to be at number 1. At various times in my life both Radiohead and the music of Gallagher's Oasis have kept me afloat when I otherwise might have gone under. Both bands are in different ways, like taking a trip to the sewer, and both have the capacity to be purifying. Radiohead for their politically-charged intensity and uncompromising intellectual honesty, Oasis for the way they match reflectiveness with snarling arrogance.

As I write, 'Take That' are enjoying a nostalgic, and probably well deserved, ITV Prime-Time special. They must have learnt by now that fame has its place, but it is a sewer in that it is not in itself fertile.

The novel that I'm currently working on has a story that unfolds over two millenia and the action revolves around a sphagnum bog. It is heavily influenced by the work of Alan Garner. He is a Cheshire based novelist who has spent nearly fifty years writing fiction of unfathomable depth and is one of the most popular children's novelists of his time. I'll leave you with a passage from his novel 'The Stone Book Quartet':

And Father went out of the room and left Mary by the fire. He went to Old William and took his Ophicleide, as he always did after shouting, and he played the hymn that Old William liked best because it was close to the beat of the loom. William sang for the rhythm, 'Nickety-nackety, Monday-come-Saturday', and Father tried to match him on the ophicleide.

William bawled:

"Oh, the years of Man are the looms of God
Let down from the place in the sun;
Wherein we are moving always,
Till the mystic work is done!"

One

2006-11-30T11:06:00.000-08:00

In an early scene in my novella 'Beyond the Wings', a family gathers around to watch the news. Although it is not said exactly what is being reported, but it is said that the family speak so much about their fear, concern and empathy that they cannot posibly take in any new information. A lot of people who live in rich countries can probably relate to this particular type of powerlessness.

As a University Graduate living in the UK, I have had more money spent on my education than most of the world earns in an entire life-time. I believe this gives me a responsibility to explore the connections between my own life and those whose lives are unimaginable to me. Part of this responsibility can be summed up by the word 'compassion'. Another part is embodied in what Harold Pinter described as a mandatory obligation to define the real truths of our lives and our societies.

Compassion derives from the Latin words 'com' meaning with, and 'passio' meaning suffering. It is an inconvenient emotion in a culture that is based on entitlement, and a popular advertising slogan runs "because you're worth it". But it is a far less base and more fruitful emotion than mere pity, that says "ain' it all a bleedin' shame". Compassion is a value that can be traced in most world religions (a theme I'll return to on this blog). For example, Confucius used the word "shu", ie using oneself as a measure in gauging the wishes of others: "Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire" (The Analects XV:25).

The English language is undoubtedly in a bad way at the present time. This is a bigger deal than many people will acknowledge. As Harold Pinter said:

"Most political systems talk in such vague language, and it’s our responsibility and our duty as citizens of our various countries to exercise acts of critical scruntiny upon that use of language. Of course, that means that one does tend to become rather unpopular. But to hell with that.”

Part of my ambition as a writer is to carve out a language within the vernacular that can be a stainless window into my budding political vision. If we live in the "free-country" that our politicians love to boast about then it's time we started living like it.